TV Talk: Pittsburgh native Jamie Widdoes helps evolve CBS sitcom ‘B Positive’

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

When CBS’s “B Positive” debuted in November 2020, it was a meh sitcom with a big question mark hanging over it: Once button-downed Drew (Thomas Middleditch) got a kidney from high school classmate wild child Gina (Annaleigh Ashford), what was the show going to be about?

The sitcom’s second season premiered earlier this month and is airing at 9:30 p.m. Thursdays on KDKA-TV. The third episode, airing this week, gives a clearer sense of the show’s future.

With Drew’s kidney transplant complete, the show’s focus has turned to Gina, who inherited millions from one of her season-one patients at the assisted living facility where she works. With that money in hand, she bought the place and this week the show introduces several new recurring characters, residents of the retirement home played by acting vets Hector Elizondo, Jane Seymour, Ben Vereen and Jim Beaver, who join season one’s Linda Lavin.

Making a wholesale change to a sitcom’s premise has become a bit of a specialty for executive producer Chuck Lorre. When his sitcom “Mom” started, it was all about a nuclear family. Within a few years, the kids and several cast members were jettisoned and the show instead focused on older women who were all part of a support group. “Mom” became a much better series because of those changes.

Lorre has the opportunity to do the same with “B Positive.” With Gina, the staff and residents of the assisted living facility now squarely in the foreground, “B Positive” won’t miss a beat if someday Drew disappears (he’s barely glimpsed in the show’s new opening credits sequence and I won’t be surprised if at some point Middleditch exits the series).

Lorre isn’t the only one with experience reshaping TV comedies. Veteran sitcom director and Pittsburgh native Jamie Widdoes, who grew up in Squirrel Hill and started his career as an actor (“Animal House”), directed the first three episodes of the second season of “B Positive.” He previously worked on “8 Simples Rules …” when star John Ritter died and the show had to be reconfigured. He directed “Two and a Half Men” when Charlie Sheen exited to be replaced by Ashton Kutcher. And he ultimately directed the final six seasons of “Mom” as it evolved, including the final eighth season after star Anna Faris departed.

“In a certain sense we were doing a pilot,” Widdoes said of the pivot “B Positive” made at the beginning of this season. “Anytime you’re doing a pilot you’re trying to, as quickly as possible, get a new cast to buy into working with each other, to understand their own characters and have it all look seamless on television.”

Perhaps more than any of Lorre’s past shows, “B Positive” was always going to have to change and move beyond the original kidney transplant premise.

“That was a curiosity for a lot of us: Where does this show go once the kidney’s been donated?” Widdoes said, crediting Lorre with a willingness to tinker with the sitcom format, which historically did not see shows making the big changes he’s embraced. “He is not afraid to try and move shows where they want to go. Because he’s that good and that successful, he gets the trust and permission from the studio and the network. Every one of the shows that I’ve been on with him have gotten a longer life as a result of the pivots that he’s been willing to make.”

Widdoes, who’s working with writers to develop several new series for networks to consider as he previously did with past shows “Dave’s World” (1993-97), “Brother’s Keeper” (1998-99, ABC) and “All About the Andersons” (2003-04, The WB), will also direct episodes of CBS’s “The Neighborhood” and Fox’s “Call Me Kat” during the 2021-22 TV season.

And while “B Positive” now features more acting veterans, Widdoes said it’s still a multi-generational show.

“Thematically it’s about something very specific, which is younger generations taking care of their parents,” he said. “That’s actually a very current theme. There is a younger element to the show [among the staff of the retirement home] and it’s that dynamic of that younger element as it relates to another generation that I think is hopefully going to be the compelling thing about the redirect.”