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Linda Lavin, who plays feisty assisted living resident Norma in “B Positive,” said the CBS sitcom will dive deeper this season into Norma’s maternal relationship with Gina (series co-star Annaleigh Ashford).
“It’s lovely and there’s a certain validation from [producer] Chuck Lorre of that relationship,” said Lavin, 84, who was promoted to series regular for Season 2. “It’s a real recognition of the power of that relationship. I play a woman who is very much a mother [to Gina] and she’s a character who’s finding her way in the world having had a difficult life and really needs a mature figure in her life — and that turns out to be Norma … who is really devoted to this young woman.
“It’s a mutual love affair and it grounds both of them,” she said. “And, for me, it’s a chance to be ironic and observant of the human condition and to be articulate and outspoken and all of the things that I love doing.”
“B Positive” (Thursdays at 9:30 p.m.) took a turn this season by veering away from its Season 1 focus on hard-partying Gina’s quest to donate a kidney to Drew (co-star Thomas Middleditch) — and all the complications (comedic and otherwise) that followed.
(Gina moved in with the divorced Drew and his teenage daughter, Maddie, played by Izzy G., and tried to stay sober so the transplant could succeed — which it did.)
In the Season 2 opener, Gina, still working at the Valley Hills assisted care facility, inherited $48 million from late resident Mr. Knudsen (Bernie Kopell). She eventually bought the facility with her newfound wealth, much to the chagrin of her cash-strapped boyfriend, Eli (Terrence Terrell), while Drew has fallen in love with her.
“I adore her,” Lavin said of Ashford. “She reminds me a lot of me when I was younger. She’s a dynamo, not just with her energy but with her great musical and comic ability — and with her pathos and connection with her heart. She’s beautiful and smart and extremely loving and easy to love.”
“B Positive” also added several familiar faces to its supporting cast this season, including Hector Elizondo, Jane Seymour, Ben Vereen, Priscilla Lopez and Jim Beaver.
“Now that the venue has changed from the dialysis room [in Season 1] to the facility … every week is going to focus on a different story and the secondary and tertiary stories,” Lavin said. “So you’ll start to learn who the people are that have come through the door, and how they illuminate the nucleus of the family that we have become.”
Lavin knows a thing or two about sitcoms. In recent years, she co-starred in “Sean Saves the World” (Sean Hayes) and in “9JKL” (opposite Elliott Gould and Mark Feuerstein). And, of course, there’s “Alice,” her trailblazing CBS sitcom (1976-85) in which she played Alice Hyatt, a single mother and waitress working in Mel’s Diner in Phoenix, Az. The series co-starred Vic Tayback, Beth Howland and Polly Holliday (“Kiss my grits!”) and was based on the 1974 movie “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” for which star Ellen Burstyn won an Oscar.
“Alice was the first blue-collar working woman and single mother in primetime,” Lavin said. (“Julia,” which premiered in 1968, featured Diahann Carroll as a nurse and a single mother.) “I had not been political in my life at all until ‘Alice’ when I recognized and learned through the research that I did … that I was representing 80% of all the working women in this country.
“So I became politicized,” she said. “I was asked to speak at rallies; I spoke at a big Labor Day rally at the Washington Monument — Pete Seeger was also on the stage — and I was invited to speak to groups of people about the Equal Rights Amendment and about topics I had to learn about on the spot, because I had been a performer and actor and in many ways [was] cut off from the life of the character I was playing.
“I marched with Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem helped me and put me on the cover of Ms. Magazine because ‘Alice’ represented a time when the workforce was denying women equal pay.
“Television offers the opportunity for people to sit and watch themselves and be validated by the characters we play,” she said. [‘B Positive’] is about people who live in a retirement home and there’s nothing like it on TV. I think it’s extraordinary for people within the framework of this comedy to sit and watch these characters and how they remind them of themselves or their parents or their aunts and uncles or children — and to see real life exploding on the small screen with the vitality of the truth of what it’s like to age and to have your lifestyle changed.”
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