Watching Laura Linney’s new Showtime comedy, The Big C, got me to thinking about how other fictional TV cancer patients have handled similar news. Frankly, I’ve been having trouble with how Linney’s character, Cathy Jamison — a high school teacher with stage 4 melanoma — has dealt with her diagnosis, keeping it from her family and acting out in uncharacteristic ways like throwing her husband out of the house with no explanation.
But Cathy’s not the only TV character to have a radical response to cancer.
The character which immediately leapt to my mind as I witnessed Linney’s formerly uptight and tidy Cathy — pour red wine onto her sofa, cancel her son’s pre-paid summer soccer camp without telling him why and deciding she no longer wanted to be someone’s wife — was Walter White from Breaking Bad, a show for which I’ve been writing CliqueClack’s Diary of a Breaking Bad virgin.
After Walt’s similarly mild mannered, rule-following high school chemistry teacher was told he had inoperable lung cancer, he also chose not to immediately tell his family that he was sick. Unbeknownst to his wife and teenage son, Walt started cooking crystal meth to raise some quick cash to leave behind for his pregnant wife and son for after Walt succumbed to his cancer. However once he went into remission, Walt decided he liked the shaved-head scary dude persona he’d developed in his drug world and didn’t want to go back to his old, tame self.
When I thought about other TV characters who’ve coped with cancer — the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a good list – none of the others seemed to have reacted as dramatically or as rashly as Cathy Jamison and Walt White.
Before Cathy Jamison had melanoma, Grey’s Anatomy’s Izzie Stevens was one of the most well known fictional patients with the disease. After experiencing hallucinations of her dead fiance (courtesy of the tumors which had spread to her brain), instead of going to oncologists who worked at her hospital for help, Izzie opted to have her interns diagnose her but only based on test results and films from an “anonymous” patient, like some kind of intern diagnosing contest. Izzie also made the surprising choice of confiding news of her illness to Cristina Yang instead of with her best friend, George O’Malley.
That move notwithstanding, learning that she had cancer didn’t prompt Izzie to suddenly unleash some suppressed inner self, though she did marry Alex at what was supposed to be Meredith and Derek’s wedding. After miraculously going into remission, Izzie fled Seattle Grace and her new husband, though most Grey’s fans knew that her departure was more about the actress Katherine Heigl leaving than a contrivance concocted by one of the show’s writers.
Brothers & Sisters last season had one of its lead characters, Kitty Walker McCallister, battle cancer shortly after she and her husband adopted a baby and smack dab in the middle of her husband’s campaign for governor. Kitty acted pretty much like Kitty usually does, scheduling a press conference to say that she fully supported her husband Robert continuing his campaign, despite her illness, as she stoically dealt with her cancer treatment while leaning on her mother for emotional support, home cooked meals and help with child care. Within the same season, Kitty received a bone marrow transplant and got well enough to start her own political campaign.
During its fourth season, Desperate Housewives’ writers gave Lynette Scavo lymphoma, and though Lynette sported head scarves for most of that season, cancer didn’t really change her demeanor or activities, post-diagnosis, with the exception of allowing herself to grow a tiny bit closer to her mother, who temporarily moved in to help her with her kids during her cancer treatment.
One TV cancer storyline from the 1990s that still looms large in my mind is the one involving Charlie Salinger (Matthew Fox from Lost) who had lymphoma on Party of Five. Charlie’s teenage siblings, Julia and Bailey, had to watch over their younger sister Claudia and their pre-school-aged brother Owen while Charlie was in the hospital and when Charlie was sidelined by radiation treatments. But when Julia and Bailey failed to notice when 15-year-old Claudia started blowing off school, Social Services took the younger kids away, temporarily.
Charlie didn’t have a chance to react to his cancer in any real way until after he was told he was in remission. After his family blew off a party to toast to his health, he took up with a woman who worked as a stripper, put orangey-blond streaks in his hair, quit his job at the family restaurant (handed over the eatery to Bailey to run) and got his exotic dancer girlfriend pregnant.
Thinking back to other TV characters with cancer, what did you think of how they responded to their diagnoses?
Clacked by Meredith O'Brien 
on Sep 08, 2010 @ 10:00 EST5EDT
