Grief-it’s what’s on TV

Shows like Shrinking & Afterlife make real grief the new popular plot thread

By Carole Trottere

I don’t want to talk about it.

That’s the way grief and loss were handled back on TV in the 1970s with shows like The Brady Bunch or The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. What did we really know about Mike Brady’s first wife? In the show’s first episode, viewers learned that she passed away, and there is a brief conversation between the father and his youngest son about keeping a photo of mom. Meanwhile, the absence of Carol Brady’s first husband remained a mystery. Little Eddie in The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, the family bounces back rather quickly as well. No grieving, tears, discussion or memories of those dead parents around the house.

In recent years, that paradigm has changed, with popular series like Shrinking, This is Us, The Bear and Afterlife tackling grief; a recent theater production titled Sorry for Your Loss focusing on the loss of a child; and even a podcast hosted by Anderson Cooper called All There Is, that includes talking and crying openly about grief.

“Grief is the one universal experience that we will all have,” says Michael Cruz Kayne, comedian and author of the play Sorry for Your Loss, about the death of his infant son.The play manages to be both heartbreaking and funny, much like real life, as he shares the myriad emotions that follow tragic loss.

An article published by the University of Cambridge estimates that for every death, nine people are affected on average by grief. COVID caused a silent epidemic of grief. Right on COVID’s heels, the fentanyl epidemic has created a whole new legion of grievers as well. A recent survey by the nonprofit Rand Corporation found that more than 40% of American adults know someone who died from an overdose.

So basically, the old “I don’t want to talk about it,” has become something we all seem to be talking about, because we want and even need to talk about it to get through life. If The Brady Bunch were rebooted today, the kids might be speaking to a grief counselor and Mike and Carol would have at least one photo of their deceased spouses around the house.

In Apple TV’s Shrinking, co-written, produced and starring Jason Segel, as a therapist grieving his wife’s death and trying to understand his daughter’s grief process, viewers watch a very realistic experience of grief unfold.

“More shows are starting to tackle the complexity, the anger and the lashing out that comes with grief,” said Litsa Williams, co-founder, along with Eleanor Haley, MS, of the online grief community What’s Your Grief?“They aren’t just sitting at home crying. Everybody in Shrinking, for example, is grieving different things, and it’s a comedy. In just a half hour they do it all brilliantly.”

In a 2023 Vanity Fair interview about his show Shrinking, Segel said he was pitched the idea for a show about a grieving therapist by co-writers Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein.

“He (Lawrence) and Brett pitched me this idea about a shrink who was grieving himself and basically going through a nervous breakdown while he continued to practice therapy. There would be this kind of even mix of big comedy and set comedy pieces, but also real pathos and we were gonna handle the grieving as honestly as possible. That seemed like this really tasty mix of everything I was looking for.”

Netflix’s Afterlife takes the audience on a messy emotional ride with recent widower Tony, played by Ricky Gervais (who also wrote and directed). Laid low to the point of considering suicide in the early stages of his grief, Tony is kept going by the simple task of feeding and caring for his dog. And surprise. Tony doesn’t “get over it” or “move on” by episode two. His grief journey is the show. He is sad and cranky and depressed for the whole season. It’s raw and real and grief counselor Sharon Greaney-Watt of Babylon thinks it’s great.

“Afterlife speaks to the importance of connection as human beings, especially in such grief,” she said. “The comfort that his dog provides, and this connection was his reason to initially keep living. I think the show speaks to the process of integrating and managing one's grief, to be able to ultimately carry the grief as one moves forward.”

One of the most poignant speeches that Gervais gives in season two of Afterlife speaks to the sad realization that every griever eventually discovers--they are forever changed and there’s no going back.

Gervais’ character says: “People think I’m sort of okay like I’m getting on with it. I’m snarky now and again and that this is a lapse but it’s not. This is me all the time now. Everything else is the front. I’m not well, but I remember what it was like to be normal, so I do an impression of that. But this is what I really am, and I want to be normal again.”

Kim Roots, managing editor of TVLine, a website devoted to all things TV, agrees that grief has come out in the open. And that TV series have come a long way since Carol and Mike Brady’s former spouses just disappeared with little explanation.

“I do feel that now it's a little bit more out in the open and used a bit more as a thread throughout a show's run,” she said.

She noted that nine-time Emmy-Award winning show, Six Feet Under, forged an early path for TV in the 2000s in its use of grief as a plot thread throughout the show. Written and directed by Alan Ball, the show centered around the Fisher Family and their family-run funeral home. The characters not only confronted death and grief daily, but they also struggled with their own grief after the sudden death of their father. The show blazed a trail by portraying real grief in all its untidy reality, a cocktail of anger, love, guilt, pain and loss. But Six Feet Under was alone at the time.

While Roots doesn’t claim to know exactly why the “grief plot thread” is more popular these days, she agrees that it seems easier to talk about feelings now than maybe it was 30 or 40 years ago.

“Maybe we’ve all had a little bit more therapy and we take a little bit more comfort in talking about these hard things in public,” she added.

Or maybe cable and, more recently, streaming have spurred an evolution towards more high-quality TV, without censors, that’s aimed at an audience willing to talk about almost anything. With cultural energy being directed at TV, the door is now open for massive changes on how everything is covered, from gays to complicated relationships to criminals to all kinds of angst. And grief.

Then there are the modern-day societal challenges, like the fentanyl crisis, that have brought grief front and center for far too many people in “real life.”

Claudia Friszell, who leads a weekly support group for those affected by addiction and grief, says that she believes the alarming rates of drug-related deaths, especially from the recent fentanyl epidemic, could be the impetus for the emergence of grief as a plot thread.

“It’s incredibly healing and comforting to see yourself and your situation on TV. Watching a character behave a little bit crazy due to grief makes me think ‘Hey, I’m not crazy after all. I feel the same way,’” said Friszell.”

“After my son passed away 24 years ago, I celebrated his birthday and my friends and family almost did an intervention thinking I had totally lost my mind,” Friszell said. “But now there are cards and party supplies for that specific occasion! Not sure if that's good or bad but it has certainly helped society to be more accepting.”

So, a weekly TV show can become a therapy session, in a sense, for a grieving viewer.

Williams believes that the time the world spent in COVID isolation could also what turned the tide.

“I think Covid did absolutely changed people's understanding of loss as something bigger than just death related losses,” she said.“I think people started to recognize grief as a combination of death and non-death loss. I think that opened a space for people to talk about it more or be more interested.”

Roots credits the comedy element of shows like Shrinking for the reason viewers are willing to take the “grief and loss ride” along with the main characters.

“The humor makes it easier to touch the harder parts,” Roots said.

CNN reporter Anderson Cooper has tapped into the need for people to talk about their grief with his podcast, All There Is, which just finished its second season. The podcast is about the grief Cooper felt when his mother died in 2019 and the grief that has defined his life since his father died when he was 10 and his brother, who died by suicide when Anderson was 21. At the conclusion of season one, Cooper received thousands of voice messages from listeners, which inspired him to produce a second season of the podcast.

One of those listeners is Barbara Olsen of Baldwin, whose son Liam died of an accidental overdose in 2017. “It’s a release and a relief to just talk or listen and be in the company of someone who truly understands even if it’s through a tv show or podcast. Anderson Cooper’s podcast allows people to call or write to him and tell a part of their story. I like that.”

During an interview on CBS Sunday Morning, Cooper said “The truth is, none of us is alone in our grief, although it certainly feels like it. The path we are on is well-traveled…everyone has felt the pain of loss or will.”

And now it seems that Hollywood and the entertainment industry are on that same well-traveled path.

Carole Trottere knows grief. Her only child Alex died on April 8, 2018at the age of 30 from a fentanyl poisoning.

©Carole Trottere