TV Networks Watch Death Closely: Terri Schiavo, Pope John Paul II, Six Feet Under

TV news doesn't report the lion's share of world happenings. It focuses on a handful of events, sometimes-trivial stories, that will deliver Nielsen numbers. TV News is never happier, more smug or self-congratulatory, then when it goes on Death Watch-Funeral Watch, as it did recently with Terri Schiavo, then again with Pope John Paul II.

Death Watch becomes them. When the prominent or rich are fixing to die, the All News, All The Time networks move in for the kill. Or, as Arianna Huffington puts it, "The pope dies and it's Must Holy See TV." The news networks love nothing better than the taste of death in their airwaves, and our morbid curiosity ensures them that A.C. Nielsen families will, as they say, "stay tuned," no matter how boring and redundant the coverage.

And, on Death Watch, the coverage is frequently rehashed. Over and again, we hear the same details; the news networks run and repeat file footage of the Grim Reaper's pending Blue Plate Special. They broadcast interviews of notables praising the gravely ill, often the very same people who were damning the individual before Joe Black cometh.

I pity the unfortunate soul who does something newsworthy during someone else's Death Watch. Obsessed with Terri Schiavo's last weeks of life, TV news barely noted her cremation. That's because she had the hubris to return to dust on JP II's Death Watch clock. Then there's poor Prince Rainier of Monaco.

For most of his life a headline grabber, he had the ill fortune to succumb during JP II: The Funeral Watch, an even bigger ratings grabber than the JP II Death Watch Spectacular. Just think of the ink that Grace Kelly's prince could have commanded had he expired during a slow news week. Saul Bellow, 89, really got screwed. An American literary giant, the Peabody, Pulitzer, and Nobel Prize winner, left this world with little more than honorable mention, because, he, too, succumbed during the JP II: Funeral Watch.

But that's just the 24/7 news networks.
Meanwhile, back on the broadcast death-works: Death Watch allows ABC, CBS, NBC, & Fox to interrupt the regularly scheduled programs that we want to watch in order to report that there's no change in the condition of the soon-to- be goner. They preempt the airing of a series' new episode, banking the fresh shows for a time when no one we care about is expiring. After all, why waste an expensive fresh episode of Joey or Will & Grace when the spiritual leader of 1.1 billion Catholics is laying in state.

At my desk, Friday morning, April 8, I envisioned the countless bleary-eyed Catholic school children that had been awake till 3:30 am, Pacific Daylight Time, watching the JP II's funeral.
That night, live from Hollywood's CBS Television City, the irascible, irreverent Bill Maher announced on his HBO series Real Time, that JP II, now entombed, cleared the track for "Prince Charles to marry Seabiscuit."

Resurrection Follows Death

Lost fans lamenting the loss of Ian Somerhalder as Boone Carlisle on the April 6 episode of the ABC megahit, relief is on the way. Somerhalder's dead Boone persona is being resurrected for Lost's two-hour Season Finale on Wednesday, May 25. The expanded finale episode recounts the flight that brought the cast to the island and delivered a Wednesday night win to ABC on a Nielsen platter.

Dead Like Me

With scant fanfare or press, Dead Like Me, Showtime's quirky, campy series about Grim Reapers, expired due to modest ratings, following the end of its second season late last summer. The Mandy Patinkin vehicle, produced for the cable network by MGM, is gone, but not entirely forgotten. So far, 30,000 Dead Heads, this columnist among them, have signed an online petition urging MGM and Showtime to resume production of the series. Regrettably, resurrection for Dead
Like Me is not imminent.

Six Feet Under Digs its Own Grave

Meantime, HBO's much awarded, praised, and chronicled Six Feet Under, creator Alan Ball's take on the Fishers, a dysfunctional Pasadena, California, family in the mortuary business, has decided to pull the plug on itself. At the conclusion of its upcoming season, the series will succumb to its desire to go out at the top of its game. It's what deceased Fisher family patriarch Nate would have wanted.
Along its groundbreaking way, Emmy, Grammy, Peabody, the Golden Globes, the Director's Guild and the Screen Actor's Guild, among others, have awarded Six Feet Under.

Executive Producer Alan Poul explains the decision to put the series to rest, this way, "We never felt that the show was an open-ended proposition. We all felt that we were telling a story that was gonna have a beginning, a middle and an end. And now we get to do the end…."

Six Feet Under's fifth and final season begins airing Monday, June 6, 9 PM on HBO. That is, if we're not on someone's DeathWatch.