Unfortunately, Laura Linney doesn't come across as a dying woman struggling to save her own life so much as a really dorky PTA mom dressed up as a clown in order to bring a little cheer to the children's cancer ward. Having just been diagnosed with Stage IV melanoma, Cathy (Linney) is haunted by the specter of approaching death, yes, but she's also super-determined to do a goofy little dance and spray a little water out of her flower lapel into some poor leukemia patient's eye. She's going to smile quizzically and shrug and give you an "Aw shucks, what can I say, folks? I'm here for 18 more months!" (Da dum dum -- ch!) and what are you going to do? Laugh? 
 
 Now that we've established my relative worthlessness in the big scheme of things, I will tell you one thing I know beyond a shadow of a doubt: A comedy about cancer needs to be really, really funny. Otherwise, it will be awful. With " The Big C " (premieres 10:30 p.m., Aug. 16, on Showtime), all of the vital signs looked good from the start. You've got Laura Linney, an actress who has been easy to love ever since she charmed the world as Mark Ruffalo's weary older sister in "You Can Count On Me." You've got Oliver Platt, known for his ability to pump vim and vigor into other oddball premium cable shows like "Bored to Death" and "Huff." 
 
 Cancer. I don't like typing that word. My sister goes to work every day and cuts cancer out of people's bodies, and I can't even type the word "cancer" without cringing. My sister looks people right in the eyes and tells them whether they'll live for another year or die in a few weeks -- and I watch shows about rich housewives for a living. 
 
 No. You're going to cringe and beg to be put out of your misery. 
 
 Now I'm going to make a wild, inappropriate guess here. I'm going to guess that either show creator Darlene Hunt or Laura Linney or both of them were given the following note at some point: "Lighten it up!" Maybe some test audience thought the story was too gloomy, too depressing, too focused on death. "Death? Yuck!" they said. "We don't want death. We want zany pot-dealer moms who shrug and slurp on frappuccinos! We want zany multiple-personality-disorder moms who shrug and toss back canned beer! We want zany nurse moms who shrug and pop prescription drugs and have affairs with their pharmacist buddies! But zany control-freak moms who shrug and get naked in the back yard, because they're about to die? No thank you! Cheer this mother up, give her a jaunty smile, a kick in her step! Make her flirt openly with her much-younger doctor! Make her scare the bejeezus out of her snarky teenage son! When she's sad about stuff, make it clear that she's also just feeling so lucky to be alive for another day! You know what this dying mom needs? She needs to smile more often! Haven't you read 'Crazy Sexy Cancer'?" 
 
 So here's Linney, smiling through every scene, cracking really funny jokes about only having a few months to live, jokes about as fun and lighthearted as an unexpected spray of water in your chemo-bloodshot eyes. Here's Cathy feeling pleased that she goaded her doctor into admitting that she has a killer rack. Here's Cathy eating only desserts and doing cartwheels in the hallway of the school where she teaches and getting a pool installed in her backyard and riding a bicycle built for two with a flower basket and streamers coming out of the handlebars. Kooky, unsexy cancer! 
 
 Cathy doesn't want chemo for her melanoma. She doesn't want any treatment that will only make her bald. She doesn't want to tell anyone she has cancer. She just wants to play practical jokes and set stuff on fire! She just wants to kick her husband, Paul (Platt), out of the house, because he's an overgrown kid, gosh darn it! She just wants to hang out with her crazy homeless-by-choice brother, the one who spends his life in various parking lots, yelling at people about how their SUVs are destroying the earth. Cathy's plucky, to-hell-with-it approach should be moving, but instead it comes off with all of the grace and ease of a grizzly bear in a ballerina skirt. Cathy titters. She sighs and squints. She giggles nervously and smiles in a pinched way. 
 
 But let's not blame this show's flaws on cancer. Cathy is a mom who suggests to her son that they "chillax" together. When he calls her gay, she yells anemically after him, "Don't use 'gay' like that!" "You're sooo not allowed to say I'm embarrassing," she warns her brother, Sean (John Benjamin Hickey), who spends every episode saying things like, "Enjoy your swirly chemicals!" and "Wake up and smell your $10 latte!" 
 
 Oliver Platt, on the other hand, succeeds at milking every oddly melancholic moment as Linney's husband. Paul rages at Cathy's inscrutability, he confesses his deepest secrets to a therapist, he misunderstands and becomes lustful and retreats and somehow Platt makes it all believable. We buy this guy as a real person, in all of his selfish, needy, self-pitying glory. Maybe the overgrown boy role is just easier to pull off, or maybe Platt is particularly great at walking that line between comic and tragic. 
 
 I really want to love Linney in this role, because she's a great actress and she does pull off about half of her scenes in "The Big C." But there's just something leaden and unnatural about the way her role is written and performed, as if someone is standing on the sidelines yelling "Smiles, everyone! Smiles!" the whole time. Because if you take the Linney we've seen before -- a little gloomy, a little shrill – and insert her into this picture, it works so much better. Instead, Cathy seems self-conscious in everything she does. She spends most of each episode grinning from ear to ear like the reluctant host of a sorority rush party, counting the seconds until she's free to get drunk on cosmopolitans. 
 
 On the page, "The Big C" is occasionally clever. But the mood of the actual show is all wrong. The timing is off. The heavy scenes are almost as badly timed and directed as the funny scenes, and those scenes that alternate between funny and sad only induce whiplash. None of the emotions in play feel remotely organic or nuanced or sweet. And by the end of the third episode, we understand exactly what we're going to see, over and over again, throughout the course of the first season: Beleaguered, denial-plagued smiley mom, man-child husband, insolent son, angry shut-in neighbor, angry overweight girl (played by Gabourey Sidibe from "Precious") trying to diet, angry radical brother. Simply putting one nutty character in a room with another nutty character does not a comedy make, yet that's what each scene of this show boils down to. 
 
 And that's a shame. Because "The Big C" could be a great show; it should be a great show. There are so many possibilities. Death brings out the best and the worst in everyone and everything, and it can be very funny -- just ask anyone who's dealt with the death of someone close to them. Instead, "The Big C" offers us the same stuff we've seen before from every cancer subplot on every TV show ever made: cute younger doctors, annoying cancer support groups, impulsive decisions and an interminable wait for the moment when our patient finally tells her family she's sick. "I'm here all year, performing at stage IV!" Cathy yells to an imaginary audience at the end of the first episode. "Come on, you've gotta give it up for me a little bit! It's kinda funny -- death comedy?" In this case, unfortunately, it's not. ||||| 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. 
 
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 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. 
 
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 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. 
 
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 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. 
 
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 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). ||||| Traditionally, the term "the Big C" refers to cancer , and as the main character of Showtime 's new series by the same name has recently been diagnosed with Stage 4 melanoma , it seems a fitting title. In this case, "The Big C" could also refer to several other things — the big concept, for instance. Showtime has developed an alarming penchant for putting women in extreme situations and playing it for comedy, albeit of the darker variety. But cancer is still dicey, hitting closer to home for many viewers than, say, split personalities ( "United States of Tara" ) or even drug addiction ("Nurse Jackie.")"The Big C" could also mean "big cast." Much has been made of critics' darling Laura Linney and her decision to enter the world of serialized television (though no doubt her Emmy win for HBO 's " John Adams " made it a tiny bit easier). Here she is joined by fellow stage actor John Benjamin Hickey ("Love! Valour! Compassion!"), the wonderfully elastic and prolific Oliver Platt , "Precious" Oscar nominee Gabourey Sidibe and veteran performer Phyllis Somerville (" NYPD Blue," "Little Children"), who inevitably steals every scene she's in.The pilot is also directed by Bill Condon , but that seems to be pushing the whole "things that begin with C" conceit. Still, even on paper, "The Big C" has a lot going on. Then the action starts and things get, well, Crazy. And not necessarily in a good way.Linney's Cathy is a high school teacher who has just learned that the large and unmistakably problematic splotch on her back is Stage 4 melanoma. She is not interested in pursuing experimental treatments or sharing this information with any of the people closest to her. Instead, she begins to survey her life through the lens of its newly measured length, and much of what she sees is not to her liking.She has a husband (Platt) so unapologetically childish that he says things like "stinky poo poo" and still gets drunk enough to pee on the front lawn; a son (Gabriel Basso) who is insolent and selfish even by early-teen standards; a wild-haired neighbor ( Somerville ) who seems to have wandered out of a Flannery O'Connor short story; a hateful, mouthy summer school student (Sidibe) and a homeless eco-activist brother (Hickey) given to wearing plastic bags around his neck.All of whom are introduced in the pilot, by the way, and this is a half-hour show.Clearly, creator and executive producer Darlene Hunt is not sending Cathy gentle into that good night or anywhere else for that matter. No, Cathy will be dropping f-bombs , digging nonpermitted pools and splattering school buses with paintballs. Although "The Big C" does pose the eternal question — How would you live your life if you knew its actual dimensions? — it tries very hard not to take the expected path.Too hard, unfortunately. So determined are Hunt, executive producer/showrunner Jenny Bicks and Linney that "The Big C" be unsentimental that they jam early episodes with so many over-blown characters and wacky antics that it's impossible to attach meaning to any of them. Platt especially is almost criminally misused; as middle-aged wild child to Cathy's more orderly (read: controlling) adult, he wanders in and out of scenes like some infantile forest creature, defined only by wifely resentment, unrecognizable as an adult male (much less one who has, apparently, a job big enough to pay for the very nice house in suburban Connecticut).Linney, who has made a career exploring the fear and rage that is so often disguised as devotion, summons her not-inconsiderable charms to create a woman teetering between breakdown and breakthrough. That Cathy has no friends outside her eccentric brother is less than believable, but it's a fair enough narrative decision. Much of the early story revolves around Cathy forming relationships with Sidibe's Andrea, whom she has decided to save from her weight problem, and Somerville's Marlene, who has hard-won wisdom to offer.But while many of the scenes of "The Big C" are compelling in themselves, taken together they create a manic and manipulative half-hour. In attempting to capture the freefall of discovering that life will be a matter of months instead of years, Hunt and her writers have surrounded Cathy with so much attention-grabbing insanity — She must have a pool! A smackdown with Andrea, another with Marlene! Her brother is a nut! But maybe he's right! No way is her son going to summer camp! And how can she live with a man who never closes the cupboard doors! — that it's hard to keep your eyes on the woman herself.Cathy's decision to keep the news of her cancer to herself is the closest thing we get to a through-line, and fortunately, it's a very good one. We all carry the certainty of our own end with us — as poet laureate W.S. Merwin reminds us: "Every year without knowing it I have passed the day / When the last fires will wave to me" — though for the most part we do it without discussion or even acknowledgment. How then should knowing the particulars change us, and what part of that knowledge do we owe friends and family? Watching Cathy flail wildly at her husband and child, one can't help but think she is treating them unfairly by not explaining what is really going on. But whatreally going on? Every day is another step toward the last, even for a teenager, and who's to say that Cathy is closer to her end than any of those around her?There are enough graceful moments in "The Big C" and certainly enough fine actors to hope that in subsequent episodes, things will slow down, that the grim determination to be "different" will give way to something, if not less outraged or outrageous, then less visibly straining to be so.
– Critics are split on The Big C, Showtime's Laura Linney-starring comedy about a woman with cancer living out the last year of her life, which debuts tonight: The cast is perhaps a bit large for a half-hour show, writes Mary McNamara in the Los Angeles Times, and the whole thing is so determined to be unsentimental that it is instead jammed "with so many over-blown characters and wacky antics that it's impossible to attach meaning to any of them." Heather Havrilesky agrees, noting that the show's attempts to "lighten up" the subject matter turn the whole thing into a "kooky, unsexy" ride that will make you "cringe and beg to be put out of your misery," she writes on Salon. But Alessandra Stanley likes it—especially Linney, "who rarely sounds a false note and here has perfect pitch," she writes in the New York Times. "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." For more on the widely admired Linney, click here.