Showtime issues a challenge with its latest documentary series, comprising six of the most emotionally draining hours of television you may watch this year.
“Time of Death,” a departure for TV, is a serious grappling with end-of-life issues for a death-denying culture.
Nobody gets out of here alive, as they say, and it’s curious that, while every aspect of love, sex and money have beem mined for TV, the medium hasn’t before milked this aspect of “reality.” Fake death, dramatic murders and supernatural slayings are all over TV, but real human mortality is kept neatly out of sight.
“Time of Death” demonstrates the path to the exit is fraught with challenges. That’s the case in the wisdom of a psychotherapist inviting the cameras into her own end stages because she wants to make it a “conscious learning” experience for herself, her family and “the world at large.”
It’s also true in the deterioration into anger of a single mother of three who is dying of cancer and facing custody issues.
In all cases, the series takes the high road and avoids narration, in documenting several lives as the clock runs out.
The incredibly intimate profiles consider the common denominators surrounding death and the difficult subjects most of us don’t like to talk about: the physical particulars of the body shutting down and the emotional minefield of loss.
Sometimes high drama ensues; in lucky families reconciliation is possible. In all cases, it seems, opening up on the subject of fears and expectations concerning death is good medicine for the soon-to-depart and those being left.
“Time of Death,” premiering Nov. 1 on Showtime, doesn’t make the finality less sad or scary (personally, it took a day or two to recover from the viewing experience) but it does suggest that a frank approach to the inevitable is the healthy way to go.
These six episodes, showcasing people of different ages, races, socio-economic standing and attitudes toward their lives, amount to an unsettling look at how Americans feel about death and the act of dying.
The question of why we are so timid on the topic goes unanswered. Neither is the U.S. ranking on the quality-of-death index, at No. 10, well below other Western nations. This series prefers to deliver an emotional wallop.
Surprisingly, the work is the result of the producers of a “reality TV” company wanting to dig deeper. Magical Elves, who previously gave us “Project Runway” and “Top Chef,” moved on to an equally universal subject, even more loaded than fashion or food.
The tone is unobtrusive, although occasionally the voice of an interviewer is present, coaxing the subjects. Executive producers used small crews embedded with the subjects to track these stories, from doctors’ offices and hospitals to homes, all the way to deathbeds.
The camera is discreet, cutting away at the very end, giving privacy when taste requires.
The families involved are brave in ways not required of ordinary “reality TV” subjects. Even when they appear to be speaking for the camera, the situations are not manipulated. The impact is quite powerful.
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830, jostrow@denverpost.com or twitter.com/ostrowdp
