This Is Happening, Unless I’m Losing My Mind

By MARK BLANKENSHIP

Most of the time, the show stages the disintegrating mind of Juliana Smithton (Laurie Metcalf), a neurologist whose life is falling apart. As she tries to understand what’s wrong with her—brain cancer? dementia?—she blurs real life with memories and hallucinations. Is her husband really leaving her? Did her runaway daughter really return? It’s almost impossible for her to know.

Sometimes, we don’t know what’s real either. Juliana might be giving a talk at a medical conference when her husband Ian (Daniel Stern) suddenly appears, but which event is actually happening? Is she imagining her husband or her PowerPoint presentation?

Eventually, though, White wants us to know what’s going on. And that’s why we suddenly encounter a realistic scene from Juliana’s past, when she has a life-changing night with her husband.

“Up to that point, scene by scene, there’d been a lot of surprising turns, and I thought, in a way, the most surprising turn now would be to take it toward normalcy and naturalism,” White says. “Let’s take it to a place where it resembles classic American naturalism. Let’s give the audience time to breathe and catch up to the story.”

Asked why that’s important, White responds, “It keeps the specifics of what’s happening to her vague, so we have time to get to know her a little more and wonder about her circumstance. If we know too much right away, it becomes the story of what’s wrong with her versus the story of her.”

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Mark Blankenship is TDF’s online content editor
Photo by Joan Marcus