The Big C aired from August 2010 until ? on Showtime.
A Review from Variety
The Big C
(Series -- Showtime, Mon. Aug. 16, 10:30 p.m.)
By BRIAN LOWRY
Filmed in Los Angeles (pilot) and Connecticut by Perkins Street Prods., Farm Kid and Original Film in association with Sony Pictures Television. Executive producers, Darlene Hunt, Jenny Bicks, Neal H. Moritz, Bill Condon, Vivian Cannon, Laura Linney; co-executive producers, Mark Kunerth, Michael Engler, Merrill H. Karpf; producer, Lou Fusaro; director, Condon; writer, Hunt.
Cathy Jamison - Laura Linney
Paul - Oliver Platt
Sean - John Benjamin Hickey
Marlene - Phyllis Somerville
Adam - Gabriel Basso
What would a middle-aged person do upon learning she has a year, maybe 18 months to live? The liberating, philosophical and, yes, comic aspects of such a diagnosis coalesce in "The Big C," a Showtime series adding Laura Linney to the pay channel's gallery of quirky leading ladies in filmed half-hours that are more dramatic than funny. Linney invests her character with the requisite anger and confusion, but she's the lone lifeline of humanity amid a talented cast mostly saddled with caricatured roles. Interesting in its conceit and watchable for what Linney brings to it, the show works too hard at whimsy.
We join the story very much in progress: Linney's Cathy Jamison -- a married high school teacher in Minnesota -- has already been informed she has Stage IV melanoma and has chosen to forgo aggressive treatment that, at best, would buy her only a little more time. Instead, she sets out to make the most of what life she has left.
As part of that decision, Cathy initially opts not to disclose her condition to anyone -- including her husband (Oliver Platt), who she has tossed from the house; and son (Gabriel Basso), both understandably confused by her behavior. This leads to slightly awkward exchanges with her doctor (Reid Scott), the one person to whom she can confide.
In a way, Cathy's determination to accomplish -- well, precisely what exactly isn't clear -- in the time available begins to feel slightly selfish, inasmuch as her decision to shield loved ones is inevitably temporary.
The supporting cast includes John Benjamin Hickey as her brother Sean -- a street-corner agitator who rails against global warming and insists on eating garbage to protest all the food Americans waste -- and "Precious" star Gabourey Sidibe as an overweight student Cathy becomes determined to help.
If only -- as created by Darlene Hunt, with Jenny Bicks functioning as showrunner -- these peripheral players weren't such one-dimensional constructs. Sidibe is particularly ill-served by strained, sitcom-y dialogue, at one point accusing Cathy of "'Blind Side' fantasies, where the uptight white bitch tries to save the black kid."
Platt, Hickey and Phyllis Somerville (as Cathy's cranky neighbor with an adorable basset hound, the perfect breed to suit the show's ambling, bittersweet tone) are good enough to prevent their characters from toppling over the edge.
Still, "The Big C" too frequently falls into what has become a kind of Showtime trap that might be called "Weeds" syndrome, where beyond the attention-getting premise (pot-peddling mom, multiple-personality mom, pill-popping nurse mom, now cancer mom), there's a surplus of quirkiness for its own sake.
To be fair, these series might benefit from weekly viewing as opposed to concentrated gulps (the first three episodes were made available), allowing an audience to spend time with the intriguing protagonists, then vacate the premises.
In the final analysis, "The Big C" gets an "E" for admirable effort but still feels like a squandered opportunity. Given the chance to explore what truly matters in life, the show ultimately provides little more than a showcase for a terrific actress, while treating death like the next slightly zany frontier.
Camera, Tobias Schliessler; production designer, Richard Sherman; editor, Brian A. Kates; music, Marcelo Zarvos; casting, Julie Tucker, Ross Meyerson. 30 MIN.
With: Gabourey Sidibe, Idris Elba, Reid Scott.
A Review from The New York Times
Television Review
It’s Hello Cancer, Goodbye Inhibitions
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: August 15, 2010
Death so often seems senseless — except on television.
Network shows almost always shroud death in veils of purpose, maybe because without them, mortality is all the more terrifying. No matter how brutally characters exit, they are killed off for a good narrative reason: so homicide detectives can seek a murderer; so doctors can try to save them; or most simply, so loved ones can find meaning in mourning.
The few series that traffic in the supernatural do so gingerly. Death on “Ghost Whisperer” is merely a passageway to a robust, anthropomorphized afterlife. And the same is true of vampire tales and other subsets of occult fiction.
“The Big C” on Showtime, which begins Monday, is about a high school teacher with incurable cancer. And that’s about it.
The absence of any defusing subplot is what makes this new series, starring Laura Linney, one of the most outré yet for “Showtime,” a cable network known for harboring marginal women with big secrets, be they Nurse Jackie and her painkillers and adultery; a closet hooker on “Secret Diary of a Call Girl”; or the ordinary wife and mom with three other identities caused by a multiple personality disorder on “United States of Tara.”
The more daring cable networks explore subjects that are too arcane or uncomfortable for network television. The act of dying, however, is trickier territory than murder, adultery, bigamy or even incest. “Six Feet Under,” on HBO, put its characters in a funeral parlor, but the series focused on the people who made their living tending to the dead. Patients on Showtime’s “Nurse Jackie” do flat line, but their deaths mainly serve to explain the heroine’s drug addiction.
Those who die on crime series like “The Sopranos” and “The Wire” do so to help — or hurt — the ones left standing. Even “Dexter,” a Showtime series about a serial killer who preys, vigilante-style, on serial killers, examines an engaging psychopath’s fixation on crime and punishment, not extinction.
The high school teacher hero of AMC’s “Breaking Bad” has cancer, but even there, the action is less about his struggle with his disease than about his decision to start a rollicking life of crime as a meth dealer.
On “The Big C” Ms. Linney’s Cathy is almost refreshingly ordinary — a Minneapolis schoolteacher with a husband and child and a dull but comfortable life. Except, of course, that she too has a secret: melanoma.
The story begins after Cathy has been told she has a year to live. It is a tribute to Ms. Linney’s talent — and her body of work in movies like “Love Actually” and “The Savages” — that viewers don’t have to see for themselves that Cathy was a reserved, apologetic person before the diagnosis, the kind of dutiful worker bee who is easily silenced by stronger personalities. Ms. Linney makes it understood before uttering a word.
“The Big C” is framed as a comedy: Cathy’s imminent death sentence unleashes another, freer side of her. Suddenly, she is speaking up, except when she decides not to.
She doesn’t tell anyone about her cancer, not even her husband, Paul (Oliver Platt), or her son, Adam (Gabriel Basso), or her brother, Sean (John Benjamin Hickey), a homeless ecology nut who lives out of Dumpsters.
Instead, Cathy tells people off — including a rude and hostile student, Andrea (Gabourey Sidibe from “Precious”), who is dangerously overweight; and a reclusive and sour neighbor, Marlene (Phyllis Somerville), who is unpleasant.
Casting off a lifetime of inhibitions, Cathy flirts with her doctor, smokes a cigarette, digs a swimming pool in her yard and, in restaurants, orders only drinks and dessert.
“The Big C” isn’t just about facing death, of course; it’s also about a woman who tries to live each day as if it were the last. The paradox of dealing playfully with a subject that is so taboo is that it’s easy to slide into safe comic clichés. In “Last Holiday,” Queen Latifah played a meek department store clerk who, when told she has a year to live, moves to a luxury hotel in Europe and savors life, delicious food and telling people exactly what she thinks.
That film was a romantic comedy with a happy ending: Queen Latifah’s character was misdiagnosed. “The Big C” is unlikely to let Cathy magically off the hook.
Accordingly, the series is at its best when sardonic and subdued. Some of the black humor is the kind that cancer patients are prone to share among themselves. Impolitic truth telling is more broadly amusing, and plenty of movies have toyed with the comedy of characters who can’t stop telling the truth, notably “Liar, Liar” and “The Invention of Lying.” Cathy is funniest when she speaks her mind.
“The Big C” works because most of the writing is strong and believable, and so is Ms. Linney, who rarely sounds a false note and here has perfect pitch.
But perhaps because the subject is so challenging, the creators took some easy shortcuts in casting other characters. Mr. Platt as Paul is childish and egotistical and very much like the childish and egotistical husband he played in Nicole Holofcener’s recent film, “Please Give.” Before playing crusty, solitary Marlene, Ms. Somerville played crusty, solitary May in the movie “Little Children.”
Ms. Linney has the harder task of portraying the kind of reserved, reticent woman she has played in the past, but one who suddenly gets, as her brother puts it, “her weird back.”
It’s a credit to the actress, and the writers, that the weirder Cathy gets, the more likable she becomes.
THE BIG C
Showtime, Monday nights at 10:30, Eastern and Pacific times; 9:30, Central time.
Created by Darlene Hunt; Ms. Hunt, Jenny Bicks, Neal H. Moritz, Vivian Cannon and Laura Linney, executive producers; Mark Kunerth, Michael Engler and Merrill H. Karpf, co-executive producers. Produced by Sony Pictures Television Inc.
WITH: Laura Linney (Cathy), Oliver Platt (Paul), John Benjamin Hickey (Sean), Phyllis Somerville (Marlene), Gabriel Basso (Adam), Gabourey Sidibe (Andrea), Idris Elba (Lenny) and Reid Scott (Dr. Todd).
A Review from USA TODAY
Laura Linney's the best thing about 'The Big C'
Updated 8/16/2010 10:24 PM
ABOUT THE SHOW
The Big C
Showtime, Monday, 10:30 ET/PT
* * (out of four)
By Robert Bianco, USA TODAY
With so many fine actors turning to TV, it's inevitable a few of them would find their way into clunkers.
What a pity it had to be Laura Linney, a wonderful performer who has gone from being the best reason to watch HBO's flawed John Adamsto being the only good reason to watch Showtime's even more flawed The Big C. Indeed, when you see how good she is in this forced and faulty comedy — how naturally she exudes warmth and easily she reveals depth — you can't help wishing she were in a show that came close to matching her efforts and effect.
Created by actor Darlene Hunt and run by Sex and the City's Jenny Bicks, Big C casts Linney as Cathy, a repressed Minneapolis schoolteacher whose life is shaken by a terminal diagnosis: stage 4 melanoma skin cancer. (Hence, the title.) Having been told she's dying, she decides, finally, to live — which in the pilot involves replacing her lump of a man-child husband (Oliver Platt) with a backyard pool.
Because Cathy refuses to tell anyone she has cancer, her sudden change in attitude shocks everyone around her. That milling crowd includes her toxic-teen son (Gabriel Basso); her bitter next-door neighbor (Phyllis Somerville); her homeless brother (John Benjamin Hickey); and the overweight student she takes on as a reclamation project (Gabourey Sidibe).
Cathy's rejection of treatment and lack of interest in support groups is sure to raise a howl from some in the cancer community. But the issue for the show isn't whether most cancer patients behave in this way or whether it's a wise way to behave; drama can't survive if limited to functioning as a public service announcement. The issue is whether it's possible to believe this woman and these people would interact in this manner — and the problem is, the answer too often is "no."
The Big C goes wrong in so many ways and so many scenes that it's hard to keep track. Cathy's son can't just play practical jokes on her; he has to pretend to cut off his finger or, even worse, throw her to the floor in a fake home invasion. Her brother can't just be homeless, he has to be "colorfully" homeless — cursing passersby and dropping trou in public. Her husband can't just be an overgrown boy; he has to be the type of boy who refers to onions as "stinky poo-poo." If, indeed, it's even possible to imagine such a person.
Throw in a bit of nudity and a few masturbation and erection jokes and you have a show filled with annoying characters stumbling their way through ridiculously exaggerated situations. Platt is a particular deal-breaker, but beyond Somerville — and the basset that plays her dog — no one is offering Linney much help.
Yet there's the rub: Even without help, Linney is so good, she single-handedly makes The Big C worth saving. (Her lecture on the link between fat and jolly is reason enough to watch tonight's premiere.) Underneath all the excess and that premium-cable drive to be more-clever-and-shocking-than-thou, there is a core of truth in the story of a mother desperate to reconnect with — and actually raise — her son before she dies. Give us that show, and we might be willing to accept the wacky-but-wise neighbor and the tough fat girl with the soft heart.
You brought a great actor to TV, Big C. Use her or lose her.
A Review from Rhe Boston Globe
TELEVISION REVIEW
The Boston Globe
Linney earns ‘The Big C’ a big A
By Matthew Gilbert
Globe Staff / August 16, 2010
Unless you’ve been through it, you don’t know exactly how you’d behave if told you had only months to live. Would you be heroic, cowardly, self-obsessed, depressed, an anxious whirl of denial, a fountain of gallows humor, a saint? All of the above? Would you pull a Walter White from “Breaking Bad’’ and become a drug kingpin with no moral center?
Showtime’s “The Big C’’ is a blackly comic portrait of one woman’s choices upon learning she has stage IV melanoma, a deadly form of skin cancer. Minneapolis schoolteacher Cathy Jamison, played by Laura Linney, is breaking good, as she sheds her lifelong mousiness and roars. And she’s breaking bad, as she keeps her diagnosis secret, refuses treatment, and dumps her husband, Paul (Oliver Platt). You might break differently, and you will probably want to judge Cathy’s behavior; but she’s breaking the only way she can, caught in a cyclone of new feelings that range from fear to euphoria — all of which Linney portrays with breathtaking spirit. Laura Linney, America’s everywoman with a vengeance.
Linney and this role were made for each other. There are a few problems with “The Big C,’’ which premieres tonight at 10:30. Occasionally, the tone veers off course into forced comic absurdity, such as when Cathy’s young doctor tells her, “You have an awesome rack.’’ The character of Cathy’s brother, Sean (John Benjamin Hickey), is a TV-ized version of a homeless man — he’s more of an irritating performance artist than a street person. But my cavils are irrelevant in the face of Linney’s extraordinary work. She brilliantly creates a woman who’s liberated by the knowledge of death, who finds her new deadline extremely motivating — a sort of Post-it note on her mirror reminding her, “Live!’’ Her Cathy embraces her fate as passionately as most of us fight ours.
When “The Big C’’ begins, Cathy has already received her diagnosis and begun to emerge from her rut. The premiere has an “in medias res’’ feel to it, which means, fortunately, we are spared the familiar drama of the Big Revelation Scene With Tears. Linney, with a few halting pauses, effortlessly lets us understand just how pent-up Cathy was before she got the bad news. We can tell she was little more than a baby sitter for her grown-up frat-boy husband, now that she refuses to mother him and kicks him out of the house. Now, she also buys a swimming pool, does cartwheels down the school hallway, and hangs out with her brother, who haunts local mall garbage dumpsters. She eats dessert for dinner, and, in a loud, symbolic rejection of suburban stasis, she sets her couch on fire.
There’s not much of the maudlin or the self-pitying in Linney’s portrayal, which may confound viewers hoping for some kind of catharsis. During the first three episodes I previewed, Cathy doesn’t ever fall apart. And yet Linney’s performance is nonetheless moving, precisely because she is not trying to milk tears. We see a person too feverishly taking control of her life because her life is so out of control. She has a lot of fight in her — the title refers to her first name as much as it does to cancer. When Cathy runs screaming from a touchy-feely support group for people with cancer, you know she’s not nearly ready to even begin to remove her armor.
Among the changes in her life, Cathy starts to rule her obnoxious teen son (Gabriel Basso) with an iron fist to save him from becoming his father. She rethinks her teaching methods, bringing a cynical, overweight student (Gabourey Sidibe) into her life, to push her toward something positive. Cutting through caution and political correctness, Cathy tells her, “You can’t be fat and mean.’’ And Cathy makes contact with her cranky shut-in of a neighbor (Phyllis Somerville) to jolt her out of her stupor. Rather than saying a long goodbye, Cathy is giving those around her one long wake-up call.
“The Big C’’ is classified as a comedy, because the episodes are a half-hour long and the script contains plenty of comic bite. But the series is fully dramatic, too, given the dire theme. The tone is in keeping with Showtime’s other portraits of women in extremis, most notably “Nurse Jackie,’’ in which Edie Falco plays a pill addict. There are laughs, but they are surrounded by grim circumstances, persistent pathos, and awesome lead performances.
A Review from The San Francisco Chronicle
Showtime's 'The Big C' is more like a C-minus
Tim Goodman
San Francisco Chronicle August 16, 2010
ALERT VIEWER The Big C: dramedy, 10:30 p.m. Mondays, Showtime
Showtime seems keen to shift away from its black comedies, such as "Weeds" and "Nurse Jackie," to something a little lighter in the future. It doesn't really make it that far with "The Big C," a half-hour dramedy about cancer starring Laura Linney. But its failure has nothing to do with being too dark and everything to do with being too light.
Too light when it comes to setting the hook and making you want to stay and watch this series past the pilot.
That's really the dark side of the hypercompetitive world of modern television: If you can't yank in viewers right from the start, chances are they'll go someplace else to find a show. And in this multichannel universe, they are likely to find what they're looking for.
Linney plays Cathy Jamison, a Minneapolis teacher who, according to her husband and brother, has always been a little uptight. Cancer, it turns out, is going to free her up to be wilder, to let her hair down. Unfortunately, that's hardly original. To have Cathy be at once liberated from her straitjacket and simultaneously bitter and sad about her condition would normally be a positive dramatic tug-of-war, but "The Big C" seems to have its tone way off from the pilot forward.
None of the problems in the series have anything to do with Linney, who continues to be worth the price of admission for whatever work she does. Like Mary-Louise Parker ("Weeds"), Edie Falco ("Nurse Jackie") and Toni Collette ("United States of Tara") before her, Linney was an impressive get for Showtime, which clearly has a bent for talented actresses of a certain age.
But what she's given to work with in "The Big C" and how the show has decided to frame her story do nothing to help the magic Linney brings to her roles. For starters, her Cathy character has no real entry for viewers.
The series kicks off with Cathy knowing she has Stage Four skin cancer but choosing to keep the truth from her family and friends. She has booted her husband Paul (Oliver Platt) out of the house, presumably because he's basically an overgrown teenage boy, and she already has one of those in her spoiled son, Adam (Gabriel Basso).
But since "the reveal" of the cancer has never been shown to viewers, we don't get to see Cathy go through any of the stages of grief to get to where she is now, which is some kind of enlightened acceptance.
We don't know what led to her kicking out Paul, who desperately wants back into their home and clearly loves her (though he leaves open cupboard doors and doesn't like her to cook with onions - examples we're given for why she's going to use her time more wisely).
We do know that Adam is upset (but not very) about his dad being kicked out of the house. But Adam is even more annoyed/embarrassed about his mom not letting him go away for a month to soccer camp. She's being extremely schmoopy with him in public and telling him how much she loves him at home. He doesn't get what's going on because she won't tell him about the cancer. Believable? Not entirely. But it sure is dramatically inconvenient.
One of the biggest problems with "The Big C" is that it seems staged and forced. It has a strangely sitcom-like cadence and you begin to wonder why, exactly, this show is on pay cable. Oh, yes - because we periodically get to see Linney nude (her character is forever seeking approval of her body) and many of the characters swear. But there's nary any grit here and it always feels like you're watching a television series, rather than being absorbed into a strong story.
None of these feelings evaporate when Cathy meets her stereotypically mean neighbor (who is old and just wants to die) or when she talks to her doctor (while inappropriately and unbelievably asking him to size up her naked body; he then calls her and agrees to have lunch).
Piling onto the light comic-fantasy element is the introduction of her homeless, pro-green, anti-consumerist brother Sean (played wonderfully by John Benjamin Hickey); and her completely random interest in an overweight student named Andrea (Oscar-nominated actress Gabourey Sidibe, who plays the role like she's in "Glee").
Despite Linney's considerable charms, the role is too thin and unbelievable to fully tap her talent - and viewers will find little reason to root for her character.
An Article fom The New Yorker
On Television
Old Mortality
Laughing, a little, at death, in “The Big C.”
by Nancy Franklin August 16, 2010
With “The Big C,” Showtime adds to its collection of series centered on women who at first pass for normal but very soon reveal themselves to be in dire, most likely irreversible, trouble. These shows themselves sometimes get into trouble that they can’t get out of, often because of the very freedom that cable offers—plots take offbeat turns that lead into increasingly dull or absurd circles, or tonal shifts go much too far—or series last for a season or two longer than they should. In “Nurse Jackie,” which stars Edie Falco, it took Jackie’s husband two full seasons to realize that his wife was a habitual pill-popper. In “Weeds,” Mary-Louise Parker plays a housewife named Nancy, who turned to drug dealing as a way to make ends meet after her husband died unexpectedly; in the course of five seasons, the series, which began as a spirited satire of suburban life, showing just how thin the veneer of propriety is, became sloppy, repetitive, and incredible, its plot threads like drunken guests who refuse to leave.
“Weeds” starts its sixth season on August 16th, and the première episode of “The Big C,” which stars Laura Linney, follows immediately afterward. Showtime pitched the shows as a matched set—on its Web site Parker and Linney were pictured together, beside the words “Two Extraordinary Women. One Big Monday Night” and “Smart, Funny, Unique Points of View. Back to Back.” Below that was another image of the pair, with the caption “Think Nancy lives life on the edge? Wait ’til you meet Cathy.” It’s ill-advised to pay too much attention to a network’s promotional gambits, except as object lessons in what not to do. In this case, Showtime appears to be both overselling and mis-selling its new show. I’m not unsympathetic; the “big C” of the title, of course, refers to cancer, and the not-quite-rightness of the promos in some way reflects the awkwardness of addressing cancer in real life. But Cathy does not live on the edge; the conceit of the show is that she has no location until she learns that she has cancer, and her mission becomes to find and explore the emotional center of her existence, to discover who she really is.
We’re not in the examining room with Cathy when she’s told that she has incurable melanoma. We first see her in her yard, in suburban Minneapolis, at the beginning of summer. She has hired a contractor to build a pool in her postage-stamp-size front yard—a folly that the pool man talks her out of, suggesting a hot tub instead. There’s a nervousness in her manner, but also a determination, as we see when a man on a motor scooter tootles into the driveway and she gives him a cold welcome. It’s her husband, Paul, played by Oliver Platt, and the diverting sight of Platt pulling into a driveway on a Vespa is a sign that—probably—Paul has grabbed all the attention in the marriage, that it’s all about him. (Platt’s funny entrance is also a sign that “The Big C” is going to be able to deliver, at least to some extent, on its promise of being a comedy. But then I’ve never been able to resist Platt, except once, a couple of years ago, when he played Nathan Detroit in a Broadway revival of “Guys and Dolls,” and gave a performance that was strangely rote.) Paul has been staying at his sister’s, because Cathy has kicked him out of the house. We’re not sure why, and neither is he. In the next scene, she’s in her dermatologist’s office, where she’s free and flirty, kicking her legs the way she used to do as a child in her family’s swimming pool and mock-chiding the handsome young Dr. Todd (Reid Scott) for not noticing her breast when it’s partially revealed by an opening in her gown.
In a sense, “The Big C” really begins when Cathy, who is forty-two, tells Dr. Todd that she’s going to forgo treatment. Jokingly, she says that she likes her hair too much to lose it, then, looking off into a mirror and inspecting her face, she adds, “My nose—now, if you told me I was going to lose my nose.” She gives him a tight, fake smile; she’s acting, because she doesn’t know what else to do. Dr. Todd doesn’t know, either—and in lieu of wisdom he hands her brochures offering guidelines and solace. “You are not alone,” one of them promises. Cathy is amused by his awkwardness—more concerned about how he’s feeling than she is about her own turmoil. By not accepting treatment, Cathy is able to keep her disease secret. Why exactly, or even why inexactly, Cathy, who has a child, a surly teen-ager named Adam (Gabriel Basso), and an obnoxious brother, Sean (John Benjamin Hickey), as well as a husband, chooses to hide her illness is not illuminated, at least in the first three episodes. (There will be thirteen this season.) This worries me, as the trope of secrecy came close to ruining “Nurse Jackie” and made me very impatient with the first season of AMC’s “Breaking Bad,” in which a man who finds out that he has lung cancer keeps the news from his family for an implausibly long time. It’s unfair to the other characters, and it’s unfair to viewers, who are blocked from fully getting to know them.
A Article from USA TODAY
Women with cancer open up about 'the big C' in real life
Melanie Hernandez, who was diagnosed with melanoma after the birth of daughter Phoenix, says she relates to the humor in Showtime's new series, The Big C. She also can relate to the difficulty of telling others of her diagnosis: It was a month before she and her husband, Roge, could tell anyone.
By Liz Szabo, USA TODAY
Melanie Hernandez noticed the lump two weeks after delivering her fourth child.
But at 31, Hernandez was too busy to think about cancer. She had a husband, a newborn, three other kids and her own preschool. She didn't want to think that the ugly, uncomfortable growth could be cancer. "Even to associate that word with your name, it's devastating," she says.
By the time a doctor diagnosed Hernandez with melanoma — nine months later — the disease had spread to her lymph nodes, requiring three surgeries. Although she shared the grim news with her husband, it was a month before the couple confided in anyone else.
"Having to tell people, that's the hardest thing," says Hernandez, who was diagnosed in January.
Hernandez says she can sympathize with the lead character in the Showtime series The Big C, which premiered last week and continues tonight at 10:30 ET/PT. Cathy, played by Laura Linney, hides her diagnosis of advanced melanoma — a deadly skin cancer with a 16% survival rate — and refuses to consider treatment.
Though The Big C is drawing a wide audience and praise for its star, it has gotten a mixed reception from cancer survivors, who now number 12 million.
Some argue that the series reflects little of their experience and wastes its opportunity to educate viewers about preventing and treating a neglected disease. Others welcome the chance to bring attention — as well as humor and warmth — to a disease that mars so many lives.
Leah Lockhart, whose melanoma also has spread to her lymph nodes, says she doesn't want the series to get bogged down in medical details. Merely mentioning melanoma is enough to draw attention to the issue, says Lockhart, 30, of Palm Bay, Fla.
"Everything else can be Googled," she says.
Some survivors say the series shines light on, and dares to poke fun at, parts of the cancer experience that might surprise people who have never had to deal with the disease.
And Hernandez notes that people can react to cancer in unexpected ways.
"Laughter is healing," she says. "It's OK to laugh at our bad luck. ... Cancer leaves you deformed, in ways that no one else can tell. It's mentally not fun. You have to be able to make fun of yourself."
Shunning support
Hernandez endured three surgeries to remove the melanoma, and she found herself turning away friends who wanted to help. Although many melanomas are related to sun exposure, hers was not. It developed on her vulva, and the surgeries were painful.
Hernandez, who lives in Willits, Calif., knew her friends meant well, but she wasn't eager for guests while recovering from a difficult procedure in a private area.
"I finally had to get a little rude and say, 'I don't want anyone at my house,' " Hernandez says. "People were taking it on themselves to volunteer for things that I didn't want. I don't like to be taken care of. I just wanted my husband, my kids, and to sit on our couch and watch movies."
Jenny Bicks, a writer on The Big C who survived early-stage breast cancer, says she wants to portray the messy mixture of emotions people feel when confronted by their own mortality, and the dilemma of deciding how to spend their remaining time.
In the opening episode, Cathy kicks her husband out of the house, flirts with her oncologist and sneaks a cigarette.
"Cathy is going to be frustratingly real," Bicks says. "She is not going to do what she is supposed to do at any point in time." In many of her decisions, "she is probably wrong, but she needs to learn that, and that is going to be part of her battle."
Some cancer survivors say they recognize Cathy's refusal to share her diagnosis with her family as a form of denial.
Bicks plans for each season to revolve around a different stage of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Cathy isn't meant to be typical or admirable, she says.
"It takes a lot of energy to tell people you are sick," Bicks says. "Every time you tell someone, you have to deal with their reaction," she says. "We'll see that in the show, where she tells someone and then suddenly is lying and telling people everything is going to be fine."
Anne Hellmann, a mother of four with advanced colorectal cancer, says she also understands Cathy's dilemma.
"When I first got my diagnosis, I was very private," says Hellmann, 50, of Kingsville, Md. "When you tell someone you are stage IV, you don't want them to give up on you. I don't consider myself terminal."
Yet Hellmann found she needed help explaining her diagnosis to her family.
"My husband and my sister kept saying, 'You're going to be cured,' " Hellmann says. "I kept saying to them, 'I'm not going to be cured.' I said to my doctor, 'You have to set something straight. I'm not going to be cured.' And he looked at them and said, 'There is no cure. That doesn't mean there is no treatment or there isn't a plan. But there is no cure."
Turning away treatment
Some cancer survivors say they understand why Cathy is unimpressed with available melanoma treatments.
Hernandez also has rejected doctors' advice. After her surgery, three doctors urged her to consider interferon, a grueling immune therapy.
The year-long treatment would have left her extremely sick, often bedridden, and would have required that she spend a month in San Francisco, 2½ hours away. At a time when she was unsure how much time she had left, Hernandez clung to her children, unable to imagine the thought of trying to find someone else to take care of them.
"If it was interferon or nothing," Hernandez says, "I would choose nothing."
She told her doctors no.
She also pulled out of a clinical trial of a new experimental drug, ipilimumab, because she would have had to stop breast-feeding her 14-month-old daughter. Her daughter cried whenever Hernandez couldn't nurse. She felt like she was pushing her child away, Hernandez says, at a time when she never wanted to let go.
"I was angry, mourning for what was, angry that this was a choice that I had to make, or that I didn't have a choice," Hernandez says. "You just find yourself grasping onto these little things, in order not to change anything. This was one more thing I was going to have to give up, and I clung to it so hard."
Hernandez says her husband of 15 years — her childhood sweetheart — never questioned her decisions. But she eventually changed her mind. She now travels to San Francisco every three weeks for treatment, although she doesn't know if she's receiving the drug or a placebo.
"I began to think I was being selfish," she says, "if I didn't do everything I possibly could."
Laughing through pain
Some cancer survivors say they recognize the absurd situations in which The Big C's heroine finds herself, such as when her oncologist — at a loss for what to say — hands her brochures instead. And Hellmann says she can sympathize when, in an upcoming episode, Cathy confronts an overzealous support group bearing an enormous casserole.
"I got a lot of bad casseroles," Hellmann says. "I said, " 'Somebody should try it,' but we just couldn't eat it."
Hellmann says she understands Cathy's pain at realizing how little time she has left. In the show's first episode, Cathy decides to build a pool in her yard and announces her plans to skip dinner in favor of liquor and desserts. Hellmann says she's trying to make better use of her time, too. When her husband didn't take a hint to buy her a new ring, she bought it for herself.
Like Cathy, many survivors says they're making time to spend with their children.
"I want to soak up every single thing around me," Hellmann says. "If my kids start talking, I just sit back and let them roll. You just want to savor every moment."
Hernandez is also making changes in her life, such as working fewer hours at her preschool to spend more time with her children.
Her new schedule will give her more time to cook a family dinner and help the kids with their homework, she says. "I want to enjoy my baby while she's still a baby," says Hernandez, whose youngest is now 18 months old.
But Hernandez acknowledges that watching The Big C may eventually prove too painful.
She notes that if The Big C succeeds and continues for several more seasons, it will only bring suffering to its heroine. And she's not sure she wants to tune in for that.
"You can only find so much comedy in someone's demise."
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