Television Makes Comedies About…Death?

Posted on October 9, 2016 at 4:21 pm

An article in The Verge discusses two television comedies about, well, death. I’m a fan of “The Good Place,” with Kristen Bell and Ted Danson in the story of a young woman who mistakenly ends up in heaven. It has some complex and thoughtful things to say about life, death, the afterlife, and the overall existential questions of purpose and meaning. One of the characters is even a former professor of ethics and philosophy. The Verge correctly calls it “conceptually ambitious.”

I am not a fan of the other show, “The Last Man on Earth,” which the Verge describes as “the high watermark of gallows humor, a release valve for our end-times anxieties.”

The end of the world scenarios are explored in dramas and comedies and mixtures of both from “The Leftovers” to “The Walking Dead” and “You, Me, and the Apocalypse.” And premiering this week, “No Tomorrow.”

What does this say about the state of the world? Are we terrified or evolving?

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