Thomas Sadoski is the kind of guy you expect to see in smart television fare. As a veteran of HBO’s Emmy winner The Newsroom and NBC’s all-star prestige remake of The Slap (co-starring Uma Thurman, Thandie Newton, and Peter Sarsgaard), Sadoski is not the type of guy you think would be delivering “Bazinga”! punchlines on a CBS sitcom. But with the debut of Life in Pieces on Monday, that’s exactly where he is.
“I never in my wildest imagination thought I would be doing a 30-minute comedy for CBS,” Sadoski says. “They called my agent and offered me the part. I kind of groused about it, and my agent said: ‘They would like you to read it.’ So I sat down and read and I thought, ‘this is really fun and really funny and well written and sweet and different. I’m interested to hear more.’ Then they said Dianne Wiest is playing the mother. I said ‘I’m in.’”
Wiest, frequent Woody Allen collaborator and the two-time Oscar winner (for Bullets Over Broadway and Hannah and Her Sisters), might have been the initial draw for Sadoski, but it’s just one of the things that makes this show very different, particularly for CBS. Better known for its three-camera sitcoms such as ratings blockbusters The Big Bang Theory and 2 Broke Girls, Life in Pieces is something else entirely. Each week the show tells four short stories based on the lives of the members of one close-knit family.
“I think that the possibilities for it are limitless,” Sadoski says, adding that he doesn’t think the conceit will be limiting. “We don’t have to get stuck into a very specific formula. We have four opportunities every show to tell a great beginning, middle, and end funny story or a touching story … Our format is going to be a really strong thing for us.”
Wiest and James Brolin play the parents and their three children, played by Fargo’s Colin Hanks, Breaking Bad’s Betsy Brandt, and Sadoski, are at different stages of their own lives. Hanks and his wife (Zoe Lister-Jones) just had their first child whereas Brandt and her husband (Dan Bakkendahl) have three children, the first of which is about to go off to college.
As for Sadoski’s character, Matt, he suffers a series of indignities in the show’s first episode. After a bad patch in his personal life, he’s forced to move back home with his parents and start dating. He gets close with a recent divorcee (Angelique Cabral) who still lives with her ex (Jordan Peele, who is suddenly everywhere). That means that after their first date, Matt tries to bring her home to close the deal, only to be interrupted by his parents.
So, which is worse, having to live with your parents or not have anywhere to have sex with your new girlfriend? “On some level it’s a tie,” Sadoski laughs. “Although there are hotels and motels to be found and back seats of cars you can try out. But there is nothing to prepare you to walk in on your adult parents having sex, so maybe that tips the balance in favor of living with your parents.”
Life in Pieces, though similar to Modern Family, is much less sunny than other TV sitcoms. The pilot features Brolin throwing his own funeral for a birthday party so he can see what things will be like when he dies – though he doesn’t get quite the reaction he expects. This show is like a prestige project gently pushing on the boundaries of what network comedies can do.
This summer Sadoski was part of a killer ensemble on NBC’s The Slap, which was aiming for a prestige feel but fell short with both critics and viewers. “If you’re going to take challenging material and do it on TV you as a network can’t be afraid of that material,” he says of some of the show’s problems.
“We would get these profoundly challenging scripts from one of the great writers living today, Jon Robin Baitz. They were articulate and deep and thick scripts and by the time it went through network notes and studio notes and editing, a lot of the edge was dulled because I think they were nervous. If you’re going to do it, you have to do it. That’s what makes Breaking Bad and House of Cards and HBO and Showtime and Netflix so popular. They aren’t watered down, and people are flocking to them for complicated material.”
While Life in Pieces isn’t nearly as complex as a show about a high school teacher who becomes a meth kingpin, part of what drew Sadoski to the material is, well, something it shares with many other CBS sitcoms. “The thing that makes the show great is that it’s very relatable. That is something it shares with any other show on CBS,” he says. “I think one of the things that makes Bing Bang Theory as successful as it is is that you have these characters that wouldn’t be relatable, but are. In some ways our show mirrors that. Regardless of where you are in your life, you can relate to these characters.”
It looks like we might get a “Bazinga”! out of Sadoski after all.
