Television/Death

Explores the relationship between television and death

• A transnational, historically wide-ranging study of death on television
• The first study to think about the posthumousness of television and how TV provides access to the dead
• Combines analyses of contemporary popular dramas and more obscure archival treasures
• Analyses the burgeoning trend for the representation of death, dying, grief, and death-related trauma on television
• Of interest to scholars of television and those situated in the growing field of death studies
• Intertwines analysis of television programmes with interviews from key producers of/participants in death-related programming

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 looks at the representation of death, dying and the afterlife on television, in historical and contemporary factual television (from around the world) and in US television drama.

Section Two focuses on dramas of grief and bereavement and discusses how the long form seriality and narrative complexity of television, from family melodramas to the ghost serial, allows for an emotionally realist representation of experiences of grief, bereavement and death-related trauma.

Finally, Section Three proposes that television has been overlooked in critical analyses of recorded sounds’ and images’ propensity to ‘bring back the dead’. It argues that television is the posthumous medium par excellence and looks at how the dead return via incorporation into new television programmes or through projects to bring television out of the archive.