\n<\/p>\n
On an evening in mid-January, there were bouquets piled outside of Linda Lavin\u2019s trailer on the Disney lot in Burbank, Calif. Nearby, on a soundstage, a black ribbon was wrapped around her caricature.<\/p>\n
Lavin had died<\/a> on Dec. 29, at age 87. Now the creators and cast of \u201cMid-Century Modern,\u201d<\/a> a Hulu sitcom that shoots in front of a live studio audience, had returned to work to honor her. That night, they would film a half-hour episode designed to pay tribute to her character, Sibyl Schneiderman, while also eulogizing an actress with an outstanding seven-decade career.<\/p>\n That was hard enough. Even harder: They had to make it funny.<\/p>\n \u201cThe job is to make sure it doesn\u2019t get too sad and too sentimental,\u201d said James Burrows<\/a>, the multicamera-sitcom legend who directed the episode. \u201cYou have to remember it\u2019s a comedy, and you\u2019ve got to make the audience laugh.\u201d<\/p>\n I had reached out to the sitcom\u2019s creators back in the fall. A new sitcom set among gay men in later life \u2014 think \u201cGolden Girls\u201d for the marriage equality set \u2014 it sounded like a hoot. It also offered a chance to explore how depictions of queer relationships have changed since the 1990s.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But when Lavin died unexpectedly after most of the season had been shot, an irreverent sitcom with an impressive zingers-per-minute rate suddenly had to pivot. So the reporting assignment pivoted, too. (All 10 episodes arrived on Friday.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Last summer, Hulu agreed to fund a new pilot from the creators of \u201cWill & Grace,\u201d<\/a> David Kohan and Max Mutchnick. Set in Palm Springs, Calif., it centered on three roommates, to be played by Nathan Lane, Matt Bomer and Nathan Lee Graham. As in \u201cThe Golden Girls,\u201d Kohan and Mutchnick knew they wanted a mother character, Sibyl, to join the roommates.<\/p>\n They considered several actresses for the Sibyl role, including Lavin, a Tony winner for \u201cBroadway Bound\u201d and a star of the seminal 1970s sitcom \u201cAlice.\u201d (Mutchnick and Kohan knew her best from the sitcom \u201cSean Saves the World,\u201d<\/a> in which she had played Sean Hayes\u2019s mother.) Burrows insisted they hire her.<\/p>\n \u201cThat woman is a heat-seeking missile for a joke,\u201d he remembered telling them.<\/p>\n The creators invited her to a video call last year to discuss the role. Lavin joined them from Berlin, where she was vacationing. \u201cShe was such a cool, spunky chick,\u201d Mutchnick said. Lavin told them she would play Sibyl if certain conditions were met. The character, the mother of Lane\u2019s Bunny, was conceived of as an Iris Apfel-type<\/a> with short white hair. Lavin objected.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201c\u2018When you see how fantastic my hair is and what kind of shape I\u2019m in, you\u2019re not going to want me to look like an old lady,\u2019\u201d Mutchnick recalled her saying.<\/p>\n On set, she bonded quickly with her castmates. \u201cShe was very disarming,\u201d Graham said. \u201cShe just made you feel like, Let\u2019s play.\u201d And she was an unfailingly good sport, even lip syncing the Salt-N-Pepa song \u201cWhatta Man\u201d in the pilot.<\/p>\n \u201cShe was 87, wearing heels and walking around like she was 37,\u201d Burrows said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n It was easy to write for Lavin\u2019s Sibyl. Lane\u2019s character quips that her bedroom \u201csmells like Nivea and disapproval\u201d and that Sibyl will probably live to 200 on cottage cheese and spite alone. When it came to her own lines, Lavin nailed them in just a take or two, imbuing grace and heart into even the meanest jibe, seemingly without effort.<\/p>\n \u201cShe was just always so grounded and real in a medium in which you can be encouraged to be over the top,\u201d Bomer said.<\/p>\n In December, a few months into filming, Lavin told the showrunners that she was ill. But her prognosis was excellent, she assured them, and she would soon begin treatment. In the event that she couldn\u2019t film, she invited to them to write her illness into the script.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Her death, at the end of the month, was sudden and unexpected. When Lane received the call, he couldn\u2019t make sense of it. \u201cWhat?\u201d he recalled asking Mutchnick, again and again. He was sure he had misheard.<\/p>\n The showrunners visited with Lavin\u2019s husband, Steve Bakunas, an actor and musician, who described to them her last moments, in the car on the way to a hospital. But even as Kohan and Mutchnick grieved, they had already decided to address the death in an episode. It would be best for them, they reasoned, best for the audience, best for the show.<\/p>\n \u201cYou have to tell the truth, and then you have to show this world moving forward,\u201d Mutchnick said later. To hew close to that truth, they went back to Bakunas to ask if they could include a version of that final conversation in the script.<\/p>\n Once that first grief had ebbed, the terror came in. \u201cThe big fear was, Are we going to be up to the gravity of the moment?\u201d Kohan said. \u201cBecause we wanted so badly to honor this woman that we all loved.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBut we didn\u2019t want to get into an area that was schmaltzy,\u201d Mutchnick added.<\/p>\n Burrows gave them some advice. The show should be a kind of sandwich. Hard comedy at the top, sentiment squeezed into the middle, a turn back toward comedy at the end.<\/p>\n \u201cLinda was a sitcom person,\u201d Mutchnick said. \u201cThat\u2019s the way we honored her.\u201d<\/p>\n The actors were on board. Lavin was an old-school trouper. They felt it was what she would have wanted.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI was emotionally bereft,\u201d Graham said. \u201cBut Linda was a real old time go-getter; she was a broad, a full-on broad. Her attitude would have been: This has happened. It sucks. But we\u2019ve got to do it, and we\u2019ve got to do it really, really well.\u201d<\/p>\n Rehearsals that week felt strange. Bomer had the sense that they were merely marking their lines, not ready yet to let the feelings out. Bakunas had given each of the actors a piece of Lavin\u2019s jewelry, which they put in their dressing rooms or in their pockets as totems.<\/p>\n By Wednesday, when I joined the cast and crew on the soundstage, it was time to tape the episode, the season\u2019s ninth. The feeling in the room, even as the warm-up comedian joked with the audience, was, Lane said later, overwhelmingly emotional. The showrunners set up a kind of protective barrier around Lane, who as Bunny would have to shoulder the sad parts.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWe tried extra specially hard to make sure people were not in his sightline, that he was just in the world of the character who had just lost his mother,\u201d Mutchnick said.<\/p>\n After a jaunty opening scene that involved a Tupperware cascade, a much more somber scene followed, in which Lane\u2019s Bunny recounted Sibyl\u2019s death, how even as he was driving her to the hospital she kept telling him to slow down.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cSibyl died,\u201d the scene began. \u201cShe\u2019s dead. My mother\u2019s dead.\u201d Between takes he wiped away his tears. Burrows put an arm around him. \u201cOK, honey,\u201d he said. \u201cTake your time.\u201d Lane reached into his pocket and touched Lavin\u2019s brooch. Then he took the scene again.<\/p>\n The taping ended with a screened montage of Lavin in previous episodes and then a video she had sent to Dan Bucatinsky, one of the writers on the show, in which she sits at a piano and sings<\/a> the 1939 ballad \u201cWe\u2019ll Meet Again.\u201d Some audience members teared up. The cast felt similarly moved.<\/p>\n \u201cSo much of the material has been some of the closest to the bone of anything I\u2019ve ever worked on,\u201d Bomer said later. \u201cI did not expect that signing up for a half-hour comedy.\u201d<\/p>\n A comedy about men in retirement, particularly one that begins with the funeral of a different character, was always going to be at least a little about death. But no one expected it to come so soon or with such intensity.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were saying goodbye to her,\u201d Mutchnick said, and Lavin\u2019s colleagues were trying to do it in the way she would have wanted \u2014 with laughs and heart.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a true love letter to Linda,\u201d Bomer said. \u201cI feel we really honored her in a beautiful way. But I obviously don\u2019t ever want to have to do that again.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n