It’s not every night a viewer can tune into the pilot of a new series and watch a new dad placing a frozen medical glove into his wife’s hooha. But that is exactly what happened in the premiere of “Life in Pieces.”
A comedic family saga-style show, this new offering from CBS tells the stories of a father, played by James Brolin, a mother, played by Dianne Wiest, and their three grown children. The storylines follow each branch of the family tree as life happens.
In the pilot episode, we rolled through one son’s date with a woman who lives with her ex-fiancé in their search for a place to hook up, the daughter coming to grips with her eldest child going on his first college visit (complete with a father-son sex talk that gets graphic), the second son’s wife's bodily functions while delivering a baby, and the patriarch’s funeral-themed 70th birthday party.
The birth of the grandchild included some rather obnoxious references to the new mom’s private area post-delivery, mostly from the ob-gyn. The doctor told her not to look at the area as it was “closed for six weeks.” Of course the mom goes home, looks, screams and the panicked husband has to comfort her amidst references to it looking like “The Predator.” The new parents were given medical gloves and instructions to fill them with water and freeze them to relieve post-partum pain. This results in an uncomfortable scene showing the new mom leaning on the kitchen sink as she directs her husband in placing the glove in the appropriate spot.
That should provide some awkward questions from younger viewers.
The unusual 70th birthday party was celebrated as a funeral, at the request of the father. He wanted to hear the tributes in person. At first I thought it was too nonsensical to think a family would put on such a display, complete with coffin, but it ended rather poignantly with family memories and a wife who broke down thinking of the real funeral in the future. The moral of the funeral story is, as the James Brolin character says, “Life is about these moments, these pieces of time.”
All in all, the stories intertwine nicely. Hopefully future episodes will feature more wholesome family moments, and fewer scenes intended solely for shock value.
