Good grief

Jessie Gaynor on the surplus of must-grieve TV.

If you’re looking to escape into television these days, you may find yourself down a deep well of sadness. The Bear, nominated for four Emmys in the Comedy category, is a grief hang. Yellowjackets’ BFF cannibalism highlights the complexity of grief. Mrs. Davis, a sci-fi rom-dram that I found so shaggy and convoluted as to be unwatchable, is also a meditation on grief. WandaVision expands the MCU to include Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Succession showed us that billionaires grieve even as they hasten society’s destruction. Shrinking is about grief and includes a 15-minute grieving hack you can try out on your own. Last but not least, And Just Like That—beloved for being emotional white noise—“got grief right” in the first season before returning (thank God) to being the lowest-stakes show on television. In sum: The Protagonists Are Not Okay.

Part of this trend is simply the way we talk about TV now: The first-person industrial complex of the early 2010s has mutated into the pegged personal essay (such as this one), and a currently-airing TV show is as good a hook as any on which to hang one’s own thoughts about grief. Some of these pieces are good, even great, like Chris Vognar’s essay about how Carmy’s experience of grief (a “roaring, chaotic, unleashed beast”) mirrored his own.

For me, the ruined escapism has been exacerbated by the collapse of another escape: Since I had my second baby six months ago, my Instagram Explore has been dominated by infant loss influencers. Women who define themselves, at least for public consumption, by unimaginable grief. That the algorithm continues to feed them to me is proof of the time I spend watching them, finger hovering, unable to look away. So maybe it’s foolish to lament the proliferation of characters defined by grief at a moment when grief can be a personal brand—one I can’t seem to stop consuming.

As essays about grief always disclaim: We are in the midst of a never-ending spiral of mourning. There’s climate grief and pandemic grief and grief over the relentless, social media-enabled visibility of this country’s horrific racial trauma. The scale is unimaginable. Maybe it feels irresponsible to make art about anything but grief, but impossible to capture the scope. If post-9/11 TV gave us the fantasy of competent leadership and superhumanly competent terrorist-busters in the form of The West Wing and 24, television in the trauma age is giving us digestible tragedy.

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