Grief on TV

 

When grief is portrayed on TV, it’s usually a surface storyline, a convenient pivot for the regular characters to do what they normally do around it. While I don’t expect any TV series to spend much time on dying or grief, because the shows are designed to entertain, when serious subjects are addressed, I want them to be depicted accurately. In real life, most of us want to deal with our problems honestly, and TV has the opportunity to show us how to move past our hesitations and fears.

 

Recently I saw a rerun of the “M.I.A.” episode of N.C.I.S. The guest character, Navy Lieutenant Laura Ellison, has ovarian cancer, and the N.C.I.S. crew is pushing to solve a murder before she dies. What its writer, Jennifer Corbett, gets right is the portrayal of the dying woman. According to Katherine Cunningham, the actress who portrays Laura, Corbett based Laura on a person she knew.

Labyrinth of the First Death

Inspector Morse

The members of grief’s subculture don’t always want superficial diversions to fill the empty hours, even though many of our days are ponderously heavy and shaded charcoal gray. Sometimes we want to dive into our chaos in intelligent and thoughtful ways. The Inspector Morse mystery series on PBS helped me do this.

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(This is part of an essay that was first published by Back Road Café, London, U.K.)

Inspector Lewis

After being gone for a while, the PBS mystery series Inspector Morse came back, but with Lewis taking over the lead role. During the time the show was off the air, Lewis’s wife has died in a car accident. Not only does Lewis have to learn to do a new job without his mentor’s advice and his wife’s support, he also has to carry on in the midst of his grief, and deal with unresolved anger at the driver who killed her.

* If you would like to read the rest of this post, let me know and I’ll send it to you. *

(This is part of an essay that was first published in Back Road Café, London, U.K.)

Diversion, Companion, or Guide?

Journal entry 26

Sometimes we need diversion from grief, but diversion that is meaningful beyond the superficial and frothy we often use to fill the hours when we don’t want to think about anything and we just want to escape. The Inspector Morse mystery series on PBS filled this need for me. Each week I would tune to and watch Chief Inspector Morse try to figure out why there was a dead body, who was responsible, and why they did it.

* If you would like to read the rest of this post, let me know and I’ll send it to you. *