James Poniewozik was blown away (paywalled) by Time Of Death, a new documentary series from Showtime:
Death on TV is not exactly rare. AMC’s guts-spattered zombie series The Walking Dead drew over 20 million viewers for its Season 4 premiere. Shootings and serial killers abound. Life is cheap on TV, or rather death is–it’s plentiful, showy, devoid of realism or consequence. But ordinary death is a blank spot in our pop memory, one we’ve filled with monsters and explosions. After a steady diet of Hollywood deaths, real ones–the labored breathing, the body becoming a slack husk–seem uncanny, alien.
In a later post, he focuses on an individual’s story:
One of the subjects who volunteered for Time of Death was Lenore Lefer, a 75-year-old therapist with pancreatic cancer, who in her professional life specialized in grief counseling for survivors. She wanted to do the series, she said, because we live in a culture that denies and avoids death. (The producers—the Magical Elves group, better known for reality shows like Top Chef—give participants a lot of space to talk about the filming itself, and stop the cameras when they request it. Lenore herself asked that cameras not be present at the moment of her death, to give space to her family.)
I think she’s right, and I suspect we’d plan for and deal with death better if we weren’t so good at avoiding it. But watching Time of Death also gave me a greater appreciation for all the entertainments we’ve developed to displace our fear of death. At one point during my binge-watch of the six episodes, I took a break to watch a screener of The Walking Dead, and its over-the-top gory re-killings were a strange kind of relief; never had I appreciated phony Hollywood death so much. (I wonder, in fact, if people who work around death for a living—nurses or hospice-care workers, say—need a similar kind of escape.)
The Dish 