CBS is doubling down on its single-camera short story sitcom Life In Pieces, picking the freshman series up for the back half of its first-season run. This, despite occasional accusations that the series’ characters are “unrelatable,” a label that’s so often been the death knell for innovative network fare. (It’s the same word, for instance, that dogged Arrested Development throughout its entire lifetime on Fox.)
Relatibility is apparently to be damned, though, because CBS is giving the series nine more episodes (or 36 stories, going by the show’s four-tale-per-episode formula). And while it’s still an open question whether executive producer Justin Adler and his team can tease something deeper out of their show’s many-perspectived look at a sprawling, multi-generational family, it’s not like locking down a cast that includes Colin Hanks, Dianne Wiest, Betsy Brandt, Dan Bakkedahl, and James Brolin for nine more weeks is ever going to seem like a bad TV business move. (Unless CBS just decides to immediately un-pick the show up again, because that’s just a thing that happens now, we guess.)