Putting Pieces Together

Taking on family life, four short stories at a time.

Lisa Rosen

Call it "Sitcom in Pieces."

Instead of the usual A, B, C stories and a tag, CBS's quirky family comedy, Life in Pieces, uses each act to tell four stories that stand on their own.

The format sprang from an idea that creator-executive producer Justin Adler had long nurtured: "What if I could do a sketch comedy about a family in the vein of Bugs Bunny and Looney Tunes, or Ali G or The Tracey Ullman Show, but it was only with our family members in each sketch?"

Problem was, he had trouble explaining the idea. The response to his pitch was that it was too nebulous. "They didn't know what the show would be every week."

Then something terrible happened. Adler was developing a pilot based on the Cameron Crowe film Say Anything for Twentieth Television. The sale to NBC was announced in the trades — to Crowe's surprise. "There was a huge miscommunication. He had not been a part of it," Adler says. "It died the next day."

It was, by far, the worst day of Adler's Hollywood career. But up from those ashes came Pieces. "It was late in the pilot season, too late to take any pitch out at that point, so Twentieth said, 'Do you have any ideas that you could write on spec?'" That Looney-styled pitch became a pilot that he wrote in a week and quickly sold to CBS.

The show's extended family consists of four couples that could stand for stages in a relationship — sweethearts falling in love, new parents fighting sleep deprivation, a husband and wife with school-age kids and a couple in their golden years — and the cast is stellar: Thomas Sadoski and Angelique Cabral, Colin Hanks and Zoe Lister-Jones, Betsy Brandt and Dan Bakkedahl, Dianne Wiest and James Brolin.

Since the weekly stories are modular, changes to one won't affect the others, a great benefit for both writing and production. A challenge Adler didn't anticipate: writing four stories a week over 22 episodes. That amounts to 88 stories. Fortunately, he notes, he has an incredible team on the show, from writers to actors to editors, "so that certainly makes my job easier."

That said, after shooting the season finale, "I will be in the fetal position for the next two months."