But Andrea isn't the only one concealing secrets. Cathy has cancer — Stage 4 melanoma — and is keeping it from her family while acting out in Showtime's unlikely comedy The Big C, premiering Monday night (10:30 ET/PT) after the season opener of Weeds.
Linney, who plays a repressed Minneapolis mom, doesn't see the show as being specifically about cancer. "It meant something to me to sort of examine time," she says, "and what do we do with it, and if you are very aware of how little you have, how does that affect your behavior, your relationships, your outlook, your humor."
She's estranged from her man-child husband (Oliver Platt), has little tolerance for her bratty, prank-playing 14-year-old son, Adam (Gabriel Basso), and becomes exasperated by her eco-protester brother, Sean (John Benjamin Hickey). And she suddenly insists on building a pool in her modest yard, annoying crotchety old neighbor Marlene (Phyllis Somerville).
"When you go from being a healthy person to someone who is perceived as being ill, people treat you differently, and I don't think she's ready to be seen as a dying person," Linney says.
"I don't think she wants to burden other people with this, and also she doesn't want to deal with their responses, their reaction to it." Yet it's liberating: "She functions, but she hasn't really been living" until now.
Sidibe took her second acting job, which she won before Precious was released, because it marked a role closer to herself than the abused daughter she portrayed in the 2009 film. "Cathy has for a lot of years lived a life for someone else, and Andrea does what Andrea wants to do," Sidibe says. "There's just a freedom that Cathy never experienced," and in return she gives Andrea emotional support she never had.
Sidibe learned from Linney's professional training in theater, movies and TV. "I really love to watch Laura work," she says. "I kind of watch her like a science experiment; it's amazing."
Linney has no firsthand experience with cancer, though "my mother was a nurse at Sloan-Kettering," a renowned New York treatment center, "so I grew up with a strong sense of cancer and what that can do to the family and caregivers."
But executive producer Jenny Bicks does. She had early-stage breast cancer 10 years ago, while working on HBO's Sex and the City, where she wrote episodes that dealt with Samantha's cancer. "I have a lot of experience writing the fine line between drama and comedy," she says. "It's very hard to get the tone right in this show, where you want people to laugh and cry once in an episode."
Creator Darlene Hunt says she was inspired by the cancer story line because "I really love trying to make dark things funny, making people laugh about something that is painful. M*A*S*H is my favorite show of all time, and tonally it felt like something similar I could do."
The 12-episode first season takes place in a single summer, just after Cathy's diagnosis, and ends with her weighing treatment options as some people in her life learn about her health. Linney, 46, says that shooting the show, between appearances on Broadway in Time Stands Still, has affected her. "Normally I don't take my work home with me, but I do think about the choices I make on a daily basis, how I choose to live my life. That was already brewing, but this show allowed me to focus on it more. I hope people will take a minute to really appreciate the privilege of growing old. It's undervalued. Not that getting old is easy, but it's a privilege to have a full life."
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