In Memory of Linda Lavin: How the ‘Mid-Century Modern’ Creators Honor the Acting Great With a Personal Sendoff

When longtime TV great and Broadway actress Linda Lavin passed away unexpectedly in late December, a deep wave of sadness was felt across the cast and crew of Hulu’s “Mid-Century Modern.”

“She had a relationship with everybody on the stage, everybody in the production office,” David Kohan, who created “Mid-Century Modern” with Max Mutchnick, told TheWrap of Lavin. “She was universally beloved, and I’m not just tossing that off the way you would say about somebody you work with — She was really, really adored.”

Kohan pointed to someone who said that in meeting Lavin for the first time, they said they made an “new, old friend” in terms of the familiarity and comfort she brought to every interaction. “That was her relationship with virtually everybody on the stage,” Mutchnick said.

Lavin passed on Sunday, Dec. 29 from complications deriving from her lung cancer, which was diagnosed during production for “Mid-Century Modern.” “It really is shockingly that someone 87-years-old is getting on, but she seemed so vital and so vibrant that it really was a shock,” Kohan added.

Lavin, who starred in the Hulu series as Sybil Schneiderman, the critical and sometimes smothering mother of Nathan Lane’s Bunny Schneiderman, passed with just three episodes left to shoot on “Mid-Century Modern.” Though Hulu granted the team an extra week to grieve Lavin before resuming filming after the holidays, it was Ryan Murphy, who serves as an executive producer on the series, who encouraged Mutchnick and Kohan to address Lavin’s death as soon as they got back to the drawing board.

“It was actually Ryan that suggested that, that we deal with it immediately,” Kohan said. “‘Don’t put it off till the very end of the season. Do it now and then, and then, what? How does the show go on?’ That became the directive for the last three episodes.”

Replacing Lavin with another actress to play Sybil was “never” an option, according to Mutchnick, who pointed to several “tacky agents at tacky agencies” who called within weeks of Lavin’s passing to check the team’s interest in recasting Lavin with another older character actress.

“There would be no replacing Linda,” Mutchnick said. “We would have to reinvent how the show held its shape.”

In Episode 9, titled “Here’s to You, Mrs. Schneiderman,” Bunny breaks the news of Sybil’s death to Matt Bomer’s Jerry and Nathan Lee Graham’s Arthur, recalling Sybil asking him to bring her to the hospital when he picked her up from the club, before ultimately dying from a heart attack.

In an effort to keep the comedic tone of the show, the episode then sees Bunny struggling to write a eulogy that would be authentic to his sometimes grouchy and unforgiving mother, which leads to Jerry and Arthur reading their last texts from Sybil as inspiration — which the team pulled from their own real-life last messages with Lavin.

“We had the gift of phone messages that she had left for many of us over the season, so we had her with us, and we still do, because no one’s getting rid of those messages,” Mutchnick said, revealing that they were planning on using those phone messages with Lavin’s voice, but they were “a little too real.” “It really helped us in writing that episode, and then it really just helps us just remember her, and somehow stay in a dynamic with her.”

“Something like this happens, and it either cleaves people apart or cleaves them together,” Kohan said. “In this case, it brought everybody together in the mutual goal of wanting to honor her memory, and because she meant so much to everybody.”

Instead of feeling pressure to add in another character to round out the show, Mutchnick and Kohan noted they were “lucky” the series had already established Bunny’s sister, Mindy (Pamela Adlon), as a character that was moving to Palm Springs. “It was just one of those things that a lucky detail took place in the writing that we had that to lean on,” Mutchnick said.

With Mutchnick and Kohan having worked together for decades, including their time crafting “Will & Grace,” Mutchnick noted the way that he and Kohan have dealt with tough times in their own lives is with humor, which he noted helped them in “creating and carving out this episode.”

“One of the things about being our age now, is that you’ve been thrown curve balls in life, and you deal with them — it’s not like, ‘I’m going to fall apart and … everything’s going to come to an end,'” Kohan said. “It is thematically consistent with the age of the people on the show — this is what happens in life and
you persevere. What choice do you have but persevere?”

“Mid-Century Modern” is now streaming on Hulu.

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