Laura Linney brings her “A” game to “The Big C”
By Stacey Harrison
When discussing her role as executive producer on her new show, Laura Linney could just as easily be talking about the character she plays.
“What it basically allows me to do, in a nutshell, is that I don’t have to keep my mouth shut if I have an opinion about something,” says the three-time Academy Award-nominated actress about The Big C, which premieres tonight on Showtime.
She plays Cathy Jamison, a high-strung Minneapolis history teacher who learns she has terminal cancer, and about a year to live. She sets about making the time she has left count, forsaking the rigors and indignities of chemotherapy while partaking in every indulgence life has to offer — and telling people what she really thinks. More importantly, she’s finally trying to be honest with herself about who she really is. Amid all this, she must deal with her man-child husband (Oliver Platt), who views her more as a stifling mother figure, a bratty teenage son (Gabriel Basso), who has learned through years of misguided upbringing not to respect her, and an anarchistic vagabond brother (John Benjamin Hickey), who disdains her bourgeois ways. None of them knows about her diagnosis, because she simply isn’t ready to face the fallout.
Oh, and it’s a comedy. [Read more →]
It’s too early to say this franchise is dead, but the resounding shrug that met the big-budget adaptation of 
Jeff VanVonderen: Well, they approached me when it was an idea. There wasn’t actually a show, it was just this idea about a show. As far as thinking there should be, or it would be great for there to be a show like this, I’m all on board with that. But I couldn’t figure out how they were going to pull it off, because I do interventions anyway. That’s what I did before, and I just couldn’t imagine somebody wanting a camera following them around. The people I work with, I just thought, “This won’t work.” … The creator, the guy who’s idea this was, he said they’d work that out. The reason I said yes is because probably half the time or more when I would do an intervention, somebody would say, “I didn’t even know there was such a thing” or they’d say, “You know, if I had known about this five years ago, maybe my dad would still be alive.” And I thought, well, what a great opportunity to let people know that there is such a thing and that it’s effective and they don’t have to give up yet, there’s more they can try. That’s why I said yes, I never really aspired to be on TV or anything, and frankly I didn’t know if they were going to pull it off. 
One of the byproducts of a movie becoming a classic is that it is imitated so often that it loses its power to thrill. It becomes something to be admired more than enjoyed. In my own experience, the example that jumps out is Psycho. Having grown up in the heyday of Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers, Alfred Hitchcock’s seminal chiller was too far removed from my sensibilities to actually scare me, but even my TV-rotted brain could tell it was a better movie than Friday the 13th Part VI. Which brings us to the point, how does Jaws hold up? 
