James Brolin and his luminous hair have joined CBS’s single-camera comedy pilot Life In Pieces. The show, from Aaron Kaplan and Better Off Ted producer Justin Adler, is about “one family, as told through separate stories of its different family members.” Brolin will play the patriarch in this Rashomon-like exercise, while Dianne Wiest (Rabbit Hole) will portray a mother who will do anything for love, but she won’t do that. In addition, Colin Hanks has been cast as their coddled son, and his presumably less-affable siblings will be played by Thomas Sadoski (The Newsroom) and Betsy Brandt (Breaking Bad). Rounding out the cast is Zoe Lister Jones (Whitney), who will play Hanks’ wife.
This sounds like a game cast for creating individual narratives about the family at large, but it’s thus far unclear whether the showrunners will take the premise and run with it by adding discrepancies between the different points of view. For example, will Hanks remember that Brandt ate the last of the baloney, while Brandt swears that it was Sadoski? Or will it be more exaggerated, like if Wiest believes that her adult children are immature, while Brolin believes that his adult children are dead? This could get wonderfully weird, except that it’s on CBS. Baloney it is.