Nothing's certain except death and meta
Discussion of universal ideas, inspired by the most recent episode of SFU. If any hint as to the events of this episode will traumatize you, don't read on. There is also discussion of a season 3 episode of Homicide and a season 6 episode of Oz. And of BtVS and ER episodes that pretty much everyone who cares has seen.
The affecting recent arcs on Six Feet Under and The Real World (which have been discussed, somewhat unsatisfyingly, in the I Like to Watch column on Salon), along with recent re-watching of the Oz episode "A Day in the Death Of..." have made me contemplate a certain sub-genre of TV episode, which I've come to call The Grief Episode.
It doesn't, and can't, occur on every show, because it requires a beloved character to die. "Beloved" in the sense that other characters on the show love that character: in most cases, the effectiveness of the episode does not depend on whether the viewer likes the character who has died, but it does require that the remaining characters have enough invested emotionally in the dead character that they react in varied and interesting ways. It's been said that funerals are about the survivors, not the deceased, and the Grief Episode works in the same way. It's often the episode that airs the week after a character's death, and it's almost always a more memorable episode than that one. In fact, The Grief Episode is often one of the best of its season, if not of the entire run of its show.
The classic, genre-establishing example is "Crosetti," the episode of Homicide in which it is revealed that the eponymous detective has committed suicide. That episode provides us with one of the show's iconic images-- Pembleton, standing on the police station steps in full dress uniform, an honor guard of one-- but the entire episode is a mosaic of reactions to death. Munch's inappropriate humor, Bayliss's navel-gazing about his own mortality, and especially Lewis's spectacular freakout as his vigilante investigation becomes wilder and more urgent. We see these characters through the lens of their own grief, and by the end of the hour, choking back sniffles, we see these characters.
The other really iconic Grief Episode is "The Body," the episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that takes place immediately after Joyce's death. "The Body" knows its purpose: it uses grayed-out lighting and long silences to draw attention to its mood. Most famously, it lacks a score entirely. But that wasn't what stuck out to the room full of college friends that I watched it with. What we remembered was Tara's speech about her mother, and Anya's speech about the comic unfairness of death. The format breaks in "The Body" are neat, but they're not strictly necessary.
Subsequent Grief Episodes are variations on a theme. "The Letter" is from season 8 of ER, one of the show's worst seasons, but it seems to be quoting "The Body" on purpose in its lighting and sound choices, to the great satisfaction of all three of us who watch both shows. The next week, we'd be subjected to the long and painful death throes of Mark Greene; I thought "The Letter" should have been the season finale. Its best shot is the last one: spring becomes summer, the fan blows the pages of the letter off the bulletin board, and everyone moves on.
"A Day in the Death Of..." is a radical twist on the above, and it's a great one. The second half of the episode centers around the impending execution of an inmate; the twist is that everyone is mourning him before he's dead. The show breaks format by spending so much time on a single arc, and it pulls out the stops on the iconic images. And then, because Oz likes to kill us dead, Cyril is granted a last-minute stay. Does the mourning count if there's no payoff?
This week's new Real World provides a different kind of twist: the characters are reacting to the death of someone they've never met. One of the housemates, Danny, loses his mother, suddenly, to a heart attack. He returns home for the funeral, so destroyed by her death (his relationship with her had been rocky) that he announces, in a melodramatic e-mail, that he's unlikely to return to the Real World house. What's stunning is that his housemates react in a fascinating variety of ways. Some are impossibly self-centered. Danny's budding girlfriend, Mel, can only think of how much her lovin' arms will comfort him. Nehemiah, on the other hand, calls his mother-- a drug addict in a residential rehab program-- and ends the conversation with one of the most heart-wrenching "I love you"s I've heard on television. And you know he's going to end every phone call to her with those words from now on.
The Real World has demonstrated a couple of valuable things about the Grief Episode genre. First, it shows that we don't need to have invested much emotion in the deceased for a Grief Episode to work. What we need to have done is invested emotion in the living protagonists who are reacting. It also demonstrates that reality shows can do Grief Episodes as well as scripted shows. MTV's patented editing tricks provide enough plot and structure to wring out our tears.
This week's Real World, in fact, offered a much fresher and more powerful addition to the genre than the much-discussed Six Feet Under episode that premiered last week, "All Alone." SFU provides the most insightful and complex discussion on TV of how our culture deals with death. I sobbed my way through this episode: David's paralysis, Brenda's regret and terror, Ruth's rage. Nonetheless, I didn't feel like "All Alone" was doing anything that hadn't been covered by earlier contributions to the Grief Episode genre.
The fact that "All Alone" still worked for me, and worked for a lot of people, speaks to the resilience of the genre. Spend an hour, or even half an hour, making us watch our favorite characters deal with death, and the catharsis trick will tend to work. This says a lot about TV as a medium. In other media, it's most commonly the death scene that makes us cry. If not, it's because the purpose of the whole work is to talk about grief. In film and theater in particular, but also in a lot of novels, we either only know the characters as grieving people, or their grief disappears into the small section of the larger story to which it's been relegated. And that's not a negatively critical statement, necessarily: Garden State is a fabulous movie, and there's a little play called Hamlet that maybe some of you have read or seen performed.
But TV is a serial, character-oriented medium, and that allows it to spend an hour on grief without being about grief. All of the above shows, save The Real World, discuss death a lot. People (or monsters, and sometimes the distinction is blurry) die every week on these shows, and the nature of death is a constant preoccupation. When the conversation turns toward a death that matters to our characters -- a death that is not all in a day's work -- these shows get to marry thematic questions with character development. But the effectiveness of Grief Episodes also trades on our commitment to the characters, as viewers of a series. We grieve along with them, because we knew the deceased but especially because we feel that we know the living. The death is personal to us because we want to comfort the people we're watching, and we want to take their grief into us, even as we know it's not real.
The affecting recent arcs on Six Feet Under and The Real World (which have been discussed, somewhat unsatisfyingly, in the I Like to Watch column on Salon), along with recent re-watching of the Oz episode "A Day in the Death Of..." have made me contemplate a certain sub-genre of TV episode, which I've come to call The Grief Episode.
It doesn't, and can't, occur on every show, because it requires a beloved character to die. "Beloved" in the sense that other characters on the show love that character: in most cases, the effectiveness of the episode does not depend on whether the viewer likes the character who has died, but it does require that the remaining characters have enough invested emotionally in the dead character that they react in varied and interesting ways. It's been said that funerals are about the survivors, not the deceased, and the Grief Episode works in the same way. It's often the episode that airs the week after a character's death, and it's almost always a more memorable episode than that one. In fact, The Grief Episode is often one of the best of its season, if not of the entire run of its show.
The classic, genre-establishing example is "Crosetti," the episode of Homicide in which it is revealed that the eponymous detective has committed suicide. That episode provides us with one of the show's iconic images-- Pembleton, standing on the police station steps in full dress uniform, an honor guard of one-- but the entire episode is a mosaic of reactions to death. Munch's inappropriate humor, Bayliss's navel-gazing about his own mortality, and especially Lewis's spectacular freakout as his vigilante investigation becomes wilder and more urgent. We see these characters through the lens of their own grief, and by the end of the hour, choking back sniffles, we see these characters.
The other really iconic Grief Episode is "The Body," the episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that takes place immediately after Joyce's death. "The Body" knows its purpose: it uses grayed-out lighting and long silences to draw attention to its mood. Most famously, it lacks a score entirely. But that wasn't what stuck out to the room full of college friends that I watched it with. What we remembered was Tara's speech about her mother, and Anya's speech about the comic unfairness of death. The format breaks in "The Body" are neat, but they're not strictly necessary.
Subsequent Grief Episodes are variations on a theme. "The Letter" is from season 8 of ER, one of the show's worst seasons, but it seems to be quoting "The Body" on purpose in its lighting and sound choices, to the great satisfaction of all three of us who watch both shows. The next week, we'd be subjected to the long and painful death throes of Mark Greene; I thought "The Letter" should have been the season finale. Its best shot is the last one: spring becomes summer, the fan blows the pages of the letter off the bulletin board, and everyone moves on.
"A Day in the Death Of..." is a radical twist on the above, and it's a great one. The second half of the episode centers around the impending execution of an inmate; the twist is that everyone is mourning him before he's dead. The show breaks format by spending so much time on a single arc, and it pulls out the stops on the iconic images. And then, because Oz likes to kill us dead, Cyril is granted a last-minute stay. Does the mourning count if there's no payoff?
This week's new Real World provides a different kind of twist: the characters are reacting to the death of someone they've never met. One of the housemates, Danny, loses his mother, suddenly, to a heart attack. He returns home for the funeral, so destroyed by her death (his relationship with her had been rocky) that he announces, in a melodramatic e-mail, that he's unlikely to return to the Real World house. What's stunning is that his housemates react in a fascinating variety of ways. Some are impossibly self-centered. Danny's budding girlfriend, Mel, can only think of how much her lovin' arms will comfort him. Nehemiah, on the other hand, calls his mother-- a drug addict in a residential rehab program-- and ends the conversation with one of the most heart-wrenching "I love you"s I've heard on television. And you know he's going to end every phone call to her with those words from now on.
The Real World has demonstrated a couple of valuable things about the Grief Episode genre. First, it shows that we don't need to have invested much emotion in the deceased for a Grief Episode to work. What we need to have done is invested emotion in the living protagonists who are reacting. It also demonstrates that reality shows can do Grief Episodes as well as scripted shows. MTV's patented editing tricks provide enough plot and structure to wring out our tears.
This week's Real World, in fact, offered a much fresher and more powerful addition to the genre than the much-discussed Six Feet Under episode that premiered last week, "All Alone." SFU provides the most insightful and complex discussion on TV of how our culture deals with death. I sobbed my way through this episode: David's paralysis, Brenda's regret and terror, Ruth's rage. Nonetheless, I didn't feel like "All Alone" was doing anything that hadn't been covered by earlier contributions to the Grief Episode genre.
The fact that "All Alone" still worked for me, and worked for a lot of people, speaks to the resilience of the genre. Spend an hour, or even half an hour, making us watch our favorite characters deal with death, and the catharsis trick will tend to work. This says a lot about TV as a medium. In other media, it's most commonly the death scene that makes us cry. If not, it's because the purpose of the whole work is to talk about grief. In film and theater in particular, but also in a lot of novels, we either only know the characters as grieving people, or their grief disappears into the small section of the larger story to which it's been relegated. And that's not a negatively critical statement, necessarily: Garden State is a fabulous movie, and there's a little play called Hamlet that maybe some of you have read or seen performed.
But TV is a serial, character-oriented medium, and that allows it to spend an hour on grief without being about grief. All of the above shows, save The Real World, discuss death a lot. People (or monsters, and sometimes the distinction is blurry) die every week on these shows, and the nature of death is a constant preoccupation. When the conversation turns toward a death that matters to our characters -- a death that is not all in a day's work -- these shows get to marry thematic questions with character development. But the effectiveness of Grief Episodes also trades on our commitment to the characters, as viewers of a series. We grieve along with them, because we knew the deceased but especially because we feel that we know the living. The death is personal to us because we want to comfort the people we're watching, and we want to take their grief into us, even as we know it's not real.