Full Description
Television/Death intertwines the study of death, dying and bereavement on television with discussion of the ways that television (and the TV archive) provides access to the dead. Section One explores the representation of death and dying on television, in historical and contemporary television documentaries. It looks at the early history of this genre as well as contemporary documentaries about a range of death and dying experiences, from home deaths to hospice care and assisted dying. Section Two focuses on dramas of grief and bereavement and discusses how contemporary complex serial television drama and comedy, from family melodramas to the ghost serial to afterlife dramadies, present emotionally realist representations of experiences of grief, bereavement and death-related trauma and explore questions like 'What happens to us after we die?' Finally, Section Three proposes that television has been overlooked in critical analyses of how recorded media 'brings back the dead'. It argues that television is the ultimate posthumous medium and looks at how the dead return via incorporation into new television programmes or through projects to bring television out of the archive.
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Television/Death
Section One: Death and Dying on Television
Chapter One: Everyday death: The early history of death on British television
Chapter Two: Signs of care: Assisted suicide on television
Section Two: Dramas of Grief, Bereavement and the Television Afterlife
Chapter Three: A good death? Death and the afterlife in US television fiction
Chapter Four: Dramas of grief: television and mourning
Chapter Five: Haunted houses, haunted landscapes: grief and trauma in the television ghost story
Section Three: Posthumous Television
Chapter Six: Entering the mausoleum: Posthumous television
Chapter Seven: Ghost town: Posthumous television in the city
Notes
References
Index
