Linda McCullough

Linda McCullough is a fixture of the Richardsons' Shaker Heights social circle, a woman who has weathered years of failed pregnancies and now finds fierce, aching joy in the baby girl she is trying to adopt. She is warm, earnest, and utterly certain that love and stability make a mother — a certainty about to be tested.

Rosemarie DeWitt refuses to let Linda become the villain the plot could easily make her; she plays the yearning underneath the entitlement so plainly that you feel for her even as you see exactly what she cannot. It's a performance built on sincerity, which is what makes the coming conflict so uncomfortable rather than simple.