First Take On the Big C

Last night I stayed up to watch the first episode of Laura Linney portraying a middle-aged woman in a new series called The Big C. The story is that she’s got a teenage son and a recently estranged, overweight husband who loves her. She lives in a suburban house that could use some work.  She teaches in a high school. She has a brother who’s deliberately homeless.

Her name’s Cathy – how ordinary can you get? Well, Cathy recently found out she has a terminal case of melanoma. In a change of pace, she expresses herself freely and does pretty much whatever she feels like doing.

For me, this TV situation has some big draws:

Laura Linney‘s a fine, not uninteresting actress. A few years ago she played a charming Abigail Adams in a history-minded miniseries. But I couldn’t bear to watch her miscast counterpart, Paul Giamatti, pretending to be President John Adams, so I didn’t. As in the storyline of the Big C, here’s an opportunity for Linney to shine.

Gabourey Sidibe, a young obese woman who stars in the movie Precious, may or may not be a fantastic figure on film or TV. She’s yet to be established beyond her debut and after watching last night’s episode I’m concerned already that she’s being “used” as an object for the protagonist’s preterminal beneficence. Still, she’s a definite plus.

The Big C‘s plot includes at least two “atypical” and potentially complex features. First, Cathy chooses not to take chemotherapy or other treatment. This intrigues me, and may be the show’s most essential component – that she doesn’t just follow her doctor’s advice. Second, she doesn’t go ahead and inform her husband, brother or son about the condition, at least not so far.

We’ve seen this non-communication before in movies (Susan Sarandon in Stepmom, for instance) and in real life, for most of human history. It’s too-easy for a blogger-patient-oncologist to forget that not long before our Facebook era, most people didn’t talk much about having cancer and even today, many patients prefer not to do so. Norms change.

If the point of the Big C is to broaden the dialog on cancer and talking about cancer, that’s worth a lot, still.

What’s wrong with the program? I think the doctor has some brushing-up to do about his image. He’s 31 and Cathy’s his first “case” – all of which is credible, but with the exception of an x-ray briefly revealed on the wall-mounted light-box, it’s not clear if he’s an oncologist or a dermatologist somehow offering her chemotherapy and pamphlets. His white coat is too short, in the style of a medical student’s. He uses few polysyllabic words. He looks well-rested and neat. In one strange scene, the patient and doctor meet for lunch at a pleasant outdoor restaurant. That’s not how oncology’s practiced, at least as I know it.

But I’m learning, too. And I’m wondering about the informational content of the doctor’s slick handouts, about which the protagonist, Cathy, has a vision.

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Related Posts:

• Does Cathy Make the Right Cancer Treatment Decision in the Big C?
• First Season Ending of the Big C
• What’s Next on the Big C? (Hopefully a Second Opinion)
• Interleukin 2, Cathy’s Planned Treatment in the Big C
• New Boss on The Office is a Breast Cancer Survivor