Dianne Wiest tries a new ‘Life’ on TV

Kansas City native Dianne Wiest wasn’t especially eager to star in a TV series filmed in Los Angeles, but here she is in her second season on CBS’ “Life in Pieces” (8:30 p.m. Thursday) as Short family matriarch Joan.

“I was very scared to commit to this,” Wiest said. “I would have to move for basically eight months from my dear New York, my concrete, and come out here to sunny Los Angeles with grass and trees. I’ve never really felt at home in L.A. I’ve only been here to work, and then I immediately go back to New York.”

For observers of the film business, the gravitational pull of New York makes sense for Wiest, known largely for her roles in quintessential New York director Woody Allen’s films, including her Oscar-winning roles in 1986’s “Hannah and Her Sisters” and 1994’s “Bullets Over Broadway.”

Justin Adler, creator of “Life in Pieces,” said he envisioned Wiest as the family matriarch but figured he couldn’t get her.

“When you’re casting something, especially on network television, which doesn’t always have the cachet of HBO, you always go for your dream, which more often than not is just a way to tell everybody, ‘This is the kind of character we’re thinking of,’ ” he said. “Dianne was the model, the dream.”

Producers were already moving on to actors they thought would be more realistic choices when Wiest expressed interested based on the pilot episode’s script.

“When I read the script I found myself laughing out loud,” Wiest said. “Being a family member is hard no matter where you are. It’s hard to be a kid, it’s hard to be a parent, it’s hard to be a brother or sister. It takes patience and kindness and forbearance. … There’s something noble about it, really, at the end of the day, to try to be a worthy member of a family, and I admired that.”

Adler said Wiest’s Joan is inspired by his own mother, with a Wiest specialty as overlay.

“What Dianne can do incredibly well is it’s impossible for her not to sound sweet,” he said. “That’s fun to write because you can write things more biting or more passive aggressive and it always comes out in this beautiful lilting voice that, as my assistant says, sounds like caramel.”

Wiest scoffs somewhat at that description.

“I think I can be awful, just awful,” she said, laughing and recalling her role as a cruel woman in the recent indie feature “Five Nights in Maine.” “Don’t think I’m always nice. I know that’s how I’ve been cast. … If they want me to be mean, I can step up to the plate more easily than I would like to admit, as my children will tell you.”

Prior to “Life in Pieces,” Wiest had appeared in TV series in regular roles only sporadically, including two seasons on “Law & Order” (2000-02) and two years on HBO’s “In Treatment” (2008-09). She described the first season of “In Treatment” as “heaven” but a new showrunner in Season 2 led to a situation of “too many cooks,” and she was happy to move on. Wiest said her “Law & Order” experience wasn’t a happy one.

“It was a great show but not the type of thing I’m any good at. I was really bad,” she said. “I was just totally miserable and asked to leave, and they were happy to get rid of me.”

Consequently, when “Life in Pieces” came calling, she was nervous based on her prior experiences working in TV.

“I checked these people out really well,” she said. “I got on the phone and they promised me that they were kind and I still didn’t believe them because my television experience has always been everyone is in such a hurry that everyone loses their heads and things aren’t as grateful as they are in the film world. But it turns out that everybody — the cast, crew, producers — are kind and smart and they weren’t lying to me. So I feel incredibly lucky to have landed on this.”

Although Wiest was born in Kansas City, her family moved on before her first birthday. Her father flew reconnaissance in World War II and met her British mother in Algiers. After retiring from the Army Air Corps, Wiest’s father flew for TWA and was stationed in Kansas City. But then he went back into the Army as a psychiatric social worker, and the family was on the move.

Wiest mostly grew up at West Point and studied dance at New York’s American School of Ballet. When her father was transferred to Nuremberg, Germany, she tried to continue her dance work but found her inability to speak German was a hurdle.

“None of the girls liked me. They made fun of me and soon enough I didn’t want to go,” Wiest said.

Her English teacher staged a production that featured Wiest.

“I got a few laughs and decided I was going to act,” she said.

For “Life in Pieces,” Wiest plays opposite James Brolin, who co-stars as Joan’s husband, John. The couple have three children: Heather (Betsy Brandt, “Breaking Bad”), Matt (Thomas Sadoski, “The Newsroom”) and Greg (Colin Hanks, “Fargo”). And there are the kids’ partners and in some cases their children, too, in this large cast comedy.

Adler acknowledged in the show’s first year shakedown cruise, Wiest didn’t have as much to do as some of the other actors.

“In some ways we under-served her, and this year we’re trying to find ways to do so much more with her,” he said.

That was especially true in the season’s second episode, when Joan has trouble sleeping and is prescribed medical marijuana.

“To tell you I’m excited to see Dianne Wiest play stoned — it is one of our great joys as writers on this show,” Adler said excitedly.

“Something has shifted in her,” Wiest teased. “And maybe once a month it will come back and you’ll see her change in unexpected ways.”

For her part, Wiest said she had “the best time” filming the Joan-does-pot episode.

“It was kind of all out,” she said of her under-the-influence performance. “I’m gonna beg to have more pot because it’s extremely freeing. It was a one-episode deal. … But maybe that will lead (Joan) to drink or try mushrooms. We’ll see how far they take it.”

This story was originally published November 7, 2016 at 4:19 PM with the headline "Dianne Wiest tries a new ‘Life’ on TV."