Inside Linda Lavin’s Pivotal Role in How ‘Mid-Century Modern’ Handled Her Death
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How fitting that TV’s most iconic waitress knew just what to order.
Despite having already built a solid theater résumé, Linda Lavin was still the new girl in town in 1976, when she wowed viewers in the sitcom Alice as a waitress and single mom. A blue-plate special of snark, wit and wisdom, Lavin’s star turn earned her two Golden Globe Awards and an Emmy nod. From there, the beloved actress bounced between the stage — including a Tony-winning performance in Neil Simon‘s Broadway Bound — and the small screen, where she’s played Sean Hayes‘ mom on Sean Saves the World, an undead Meals-on-Wheels recipient on Santa Clarita Diet and, most recently, a nosy neighbor on Netflix’s No Good Deed.
Disney
Now, Lavin — who passed away in December shortly after being diagnosed with lung cancer — is getting her rightful flowers in the deeply emotional and authentic ninth episode of Hulu’s Mid-Century Modern, which she was filming up until her death. As Sybil Schneiderman, the anti-Mrs. Garrett to son Bunny (Nathan Lane) and his two gay besties-turned-roomies Jerry and Arthur (Matt Bomer and Nathan Lee Graham), Lavin was a blast of feisty sass that fit perfectly into the comedy from Will & Grace creators Max Mutchnick and David Kohan. And it was the actress herself who urged her bosses to make sure that didn’t stick the truth into the closet.
“It was a directive actually from Linda,” reveals Kohan, who co-wrote “Here’s to You, Mrs. Schneiderman” with Kohan. “When she was diagnosed with [lung cancer], she was like, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to respond to this, but whatever it is, write it into the character.’”
“Only David, Nathan [Lane], and I knew kind of what was going on, and she was very clear to the three of us that she wanted us to tell the truth,” continues Mutchnick. “And certainly she had no idea that it was going to go to the place that it went to. But she had talked about it with us and her husband, Steve Bakunas, so when it happened, that gave us the go-ahead and the comfort and the freedom as writers to sit down with Steve and say, ‘Hey, we’d like to actually write the last day the way that it happened and make that our story.’ And without skipping a beat, Steve said, ‘Of course that’s what you have to do, because that’s what Linda would want you to do.'”
ALICE, Linda Lavin, TV GUIDE cover, October 23-29, 1976. TV Guide/courtesy Everett Collection
“The writers took a week and wrote this beautiful script,” adds Lane, a longtime Lavin friend. “It’s just a great tribute to Linda and also made sense for the characters. It’s interesting, it took the show in a direction that obviously we weren’t expecting and never wanted to go to, but in many ways, for Bunny to lose the most important relationship in his life, it only makes this chosen family of Arthur and Jerry all the more important.”
Admitting that “it would’ve been very easy for that episode to go sideways or get wonky or be maudlin,” Mutchnick says that having the actual events of Lavin’s final hours “kind of in our back pocket…allowed us to write a very honest episode.” So don’t expect the usual multi-cam cacophony of laughs from the live studio audience. While there are frequent bursts of humor, once Bunny recounts to the guys how he was with his mom (off-camera) when she suffered a heart attack on the way to the hospital, there are also those hard-to-breathe moments of grief that will be familiar to anyone who has survived a great loss.
Disney/Chris Haston
“[Having] 12 minutes of pin-drop silence is not something that you ever experienced,” says Mutchnick. “But we had made a decision in producing the episode and putting it together that once [Bunny tells the guys], we were just going to roll cameras and play this portion of the episode with the real sound of what would happen in a house if this information dropped. And the studio audience went along the ride in the most glorious way.”
As for how Kohan and Mutchnick plan to fill the hole left by Sybil’s death, they had Bunny, Jerry and Arthur’s already established found-family tree to lean on. “When a show is working, you have these little magical blessings that take place along the way. And in the case of this show, one of them was the casting of Pam Adlon as Mindy Schneiderman.”
“She is a different sound and is a different meter than these three guys. So it ended up being a place where we could go that felt very organic…we naturally shifted to Bunny’s sister. Again, we didn’t plan on doing that, but it was there. It lived inside the show and it was organic and it was the truth.” Still, as lucky as MCM is to have the Better Things alum on deck, they all know there is no replacing TV royalty like Lavin.
“It’s just not possible, because you can’t beat Linda,” offers Kohan. “And we wouldn’t want to.”
Mid-Century Modern, Streaming Now, Hulu
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