Why We Need More Death on TV

What 'Six Feet Under,' 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer,' and 'Succession' got right ... and why I'm still angry at that 'This Is Us' Super Bowl episode.

A teenage boy, annoyed by his little brother, tells him to go play in their mom’s room so he can get high in peace. The younger brother finds a gun under the bed there and accidentally kills himself. A single woman chokes to death on her microwave dinner. A vibrant 75-year-old woman suffers a fatal bee sting.

The opening scene of every episode of Six Feet Under shows us a moment of death. The scenarios are tragic, terrifying, peaceful, surprising, inevitable, and sometimes even a little bit funny. But there’s always a quiet finality to them: We know that this suddenly dead body is on its way to Fischer and Sons funeral home, the setting of this family drama, to be, ultimately, respectfully, disposed of. There is a relentlessness to the way this happens at the top of every episode, mimicking the ceaselessness of death itself. The series finale [SPOILER ALERT] underscores this by showing us the eventual deaths of every major character, one of the greatest endings in TV history. There is, after all, something profound about a moment of death, no matter who the deceased was; when you know the ending, you immediately understand the story in its entirety. Oh. So this is how it ends.

Six Feet Under, which ran on HBO from 2001 to 2005, recently began streaming on Netflix, emerging for a new audience in a TV landscape that feels more suited to its dark humor and unflinching attitude toward death—a landscape that its pioneering approach helped to shape. As I’ve been rewatching, I’ve appreciated what it showed us, that there’s something great to be gained by genuinely grappling with death. Our pop culture landscape has long been riddled with superficial deaths and gratuitous violence. It also remains obsessed with youth, with literally trying to freeze the passage of time, not only with Botox but also with endless nostalgia, with reboots and remakes that refuse to let old, beloved works die.

We desperately need shows like Six Feet Under and its spiritual heirs to help us, through art, to normalize grief and remind us of our ultimate fate—our eventual death is, after all, what gives our lives meaning. Other cultures have more direct ways of addressing death; Mexico, for instance, has its Day of the Dead celebrations, which are often joyous. One of my favorite things about my Buddhist practice is the no-nonsense way that Buddhism approaches death. A core tenet is that of “impermanence,” the idea that all things change and end, and that, if we are lucky to live long enough, we will all experience old age, sickness, and death. Buddhist practice is largely pitched toward ways to cope with this reality.

In general, however, Americans tend to shy away from conversations about death. I remember being taught in journalism school to use the direct verb “died” in obituaries and news stories, rather than vague terms like “passed away” or “passed on.” I picked up and retained this habit even in regular conversation, but I can tell it often sounds harsh to others, who sometimes literally wince at this simple and true verb. Even the stark reality of covid did not seem to change our attitudes much. A 2022 survey from Better Place Forests (which scatters cremation ashes around trees in protected forests as a burial alternative) found that more than half of respondents claimed to be thinking more about death since the pandemic, but 85 percent of them didn’t want to start a conversation about it. Most (70 percent) hadn’t made end-of-life plans.

TV can help to change the way we view death. It has, of course, traditionally been a pathologically sunny medium, divorced from the realities of life. But it’s also incredibly intimate, sitting in our living rooms and our bedrooms, luring us into long-term relationships with its characters. Thus the times that it does directly address death affect us deeply and allow us the space to contemplate our own forms of grief as well as our own eventual demise. One such instance from around the time of Six Feet Under’s premiere was the 2001 Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “The Body,” in which Buffy, who has spent four and a half seasons of television fighting supernatural beings and repeatedly saving the world, finds her mother dead of a brain aneurysm. Buffy’s powerlessness becomes palpable through the details—lingering silences, pulling down her mother’s skirt after it rides up during unsuccessful CPR, wind chimes sounding as Buffy vomits.

Buffy and Six Feet Under, however, remained exceptions when it came to facing death on television in the 2000s. Only in the last decade or so have more series begun to face death in a meaningful way. The Leftovers, starting in 2014, imagined what would happen if 2 percent of the world’s population suddenly vanished inexplicably, leaving everyone else to grieve without knowing what had happened, why, and if it would one day be reversed. Fleabag (2016) and Dead to Me (2019) made some very dark comedy out of very flawed women grappling with loss. And The Good Place (2016) reimagined the afterlife to touching, comic, colorful, twisty effect, in the end offering a meditation on the ways that death imbues life with meaning.

Bojack Horseman, one of my favorite series, offered a unique twist on death-as-meaning in its wallop of a finale. Bojack, an animated horse-man character, is the washed-up star of an ‘80s sitcom who struggles to let go of his past glory days. He refuses to face impermanence. As the remainder of his empty life stretches before him, he flails about, turning to substances and sex to fill the void. His attachment to the past is writ large in the final episodes when he breaks into his old house to watch recordings of his old show, Horsin’ Around, and then attempts suicide in his old swimming pool. After a lengthy near-death experience, he awakens, is arrested, and serves prison time for breaking and entering.

In the series’ final moments, he’s gotten a temporary leave from prison to attend a wedding, where he has this exchange with his friend Diane:

Bojack: "Well, what are you going to do? Life's a bitch and then you die, right?"

Diane: "Sometimes. Sometimes life's a bitch and then you keep living." Pause. "But it's a nice night, huh?"

Bojack: "Yeah. This is nice."

The finale, called “Nice While It Lasted,” ends here. For a character to whom life just seemed too hard, to whom death seemed preferable, the real challenge is to keep living, and to find the “nice” while you can. But to do so, you must let go of attachments, to keep living forward, and to be ready for your death when it comes.

These are signs of hope in a cultural landscape that is otherwise pathologically in denial of our ultimate fate. The threat of death has been used as a plot device, though we’ve usually been able to rest assured that main characters aren’t going anywhere. Violence without much consequence has served as entertainment for all of Hollywood history, and grief has been used as a cheap emotional ploy—the parent avenging a child’s death, the weepy TV movie about a love cut short by untimely death.

Even on a more recent show dedicated to grief, death became more emotional manipulation than profound truth. This Is Us followed the Pearson family and its three adult children in current time, supplemented by flashbacks (and flash-forwards) to various times in family members’ lives. The main timeline takes place two decades after the death of patriarch Jack, and for the first season and a half, the mystery of his cause of death looms, becoming a blunt tool of suspense. It’s finally revealed in a sensationalized sequence that, in an act of spectacular corporate synergy, takes place on a Super Bowl Sunday—to be broadcast in a much-hyped episode airing immediately following Super Bowl LII in 2018. I admit that I cried hard when we finally witnessed his death, which, absurdly, involved … a CrockPot. I had a complicated relationship with the show, which premiered before my father died and revealed Jack’s death a year after he died. It did help me process some grief, but I felt constantly toyed with along the way. For an idea of what the melodramatic hype looked like:

Contrast this with the devastating portrayal of the death of a very different TV patriarch, the fearsome business titan Logan Roy of Succession. Here is a family drama that oozed cynicism and forgave none of his children as they vied for control of Logan’s empire. And in retrospect, it telegraphed his death from the beginning—from the title, really. Yet it handled Logan’s death with a commitment to realism that I have rarely seen.

When he drops dead on a plane in the middle of season 4, we’re as disoriented as his four adult children. It plays out in real time, filled with uncertainty (how do you know when someone’s really gone?) and denial (surely Logan Roy can’t die). His body simply lies still, its cantankerous and brutal spirit suddenly vanished, changing everything and yet resisting the kind of pomp that accompanied Jack Pearson’s demise. As someone who experienced the death of a father, I’ve never seen it depicted so shockingly accurately, that feeling of just: So that’s it? Surely that can’t be it. Oh, that’s it.

We have, at long last, arrived at a place where death has a real presence in our television narratives—at least some of them—and that is a welcome outgrowth of the Prestige TV era. Grappling with death allows us to consider how to deal with being consciousness stuck in bodies on earth, and inevitably brings up sticky philosophical questions, ethical dilemmas, and religion. It’s no wonder TV has often been skittish to pull on that loose thread, but it’s also no wonder that it pays huge artistic dividends.

I wonder if this daring will last as Peak TV comes to a close and streaming services move into more crowd-pleasing territory to maximize profits, keep subscribers, and please the new incursion of advertising into the medium. With this reversion to traditional TV practices, we risk losing all we’ve gained from the freedom of cable and ad-free streaming, and going back in time to TV’s dumbest and safest programming and away from its most contemplative. I hope programming executives note that even Barbie, the biggest sensation of 2023, placed this existential question at its center: “Do you guys ever think about dying?”

I recall reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking in the 2000s, in the time of Six Feet Under. It was a revelation, a cultural force, I believe because it told the unvarnished truth about loss and impermanence. Even if we found the perfect love, it said, that love will end. Suffering is inevitable, and unpredictable. “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it,” Didion writes. “We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”

This is why we need more honest chroniclers of death, to tell us these details, these truths. This won’t make it any easier when we face our own grief, or even our own deaths. But we may have lived our lives a little better, facing the one reality we all share, that while TV characters can live forever, we will one day cease to be.