Everyone loves to watch Laura Linney, but ...

Who doesn't love to watch Laura Linney in just about anything? What a great actor, what a great voice, what a fine presence in movies or on TV. But is she enough to carry the Showtime series "The Big C"? Not for me, unfortunately. Showtime seems to have a formula for success down pretty well, and I guess it's working for them: get an actor (or more often an actress) who's not glamorous but who's hugely popular and likable from previous TV or, better, movies, and build the show around her: Linney, Edie Falco in Nurse Jackie, Tonie Collette in The United States of Tara, to a lesser extent Marie-Louise Parker in Weeds. For me, in each of these, beyond the stars the plots are so weak, the scripts so tenuous, and the supporting cast so ordinary (I've liked Oliver Platt a lot since he starred in the Showtime series Huff, but he seems to just bumble through The Big C) that the shows just don't work. As noted in an earlier post, HBO and Showtime have very different production philosophies. To oversimplify, HBO takes what appears to be a totally unusual family - a mob family, undertakers - and shows how they're actually kind of ordinary, just like us. Showtime does the opposite: takes what on the surface appears to be an ordinary, generally suburban household and shows that once you get inside they're really strange: multiple personalities, drug addiction, in the case of the Big C a cancer patient who decides to live her remaining days to their extreme. These plots are therefore very difficult to manage and in the Big C, as I go through the first season, I find I believe in it less and less - as with too many Showtime series, I'm lost.