Written Out
Well, I finally made it to the end of Six Feet Under. I’d started watching it eight years ago, but I’m sure I’m not the only person to have had their viewing of this fine series interrupted by someone dying in real life – in my case, the elderly relative who’d played ‘The Pensioner Who’d Like to Complain’ on radio’s Martin/Molloy.* It was years before I was ready to pick up where I’d left off; years in which I’d repeatedly had to stuff cushions into my ears to avoid accidentally hearing about what happens in the final episode (if you’re in the same boat, I urge you to stop reading now.) What in fact happens is that, as I should have guessed, everybody dies. The person I was watching it with was blubbing her eyes out, but I couldn’t feel too sorry for the Fishers; by my calculation, most of them lived to about 120, while their floundering funeral business appeared to survive deep into the twenty-first century, presumably continuing to attract an inordinate number of javelin accidents, lightning strikes and decapitations.
Certainly Nate’s death, in the third-to-last episode, came as a shock, but then, it’s never too sad when someone dies on Six Feet Under, as they continue to lurk about Ghost and Mrs Muir-style, chiming in from the sidelines. Surely Michael C Hall, now playing Dexter on Dexter, must be hanging out for a role where he isn’t endlessly berated by his wisecracking Ghost Dad.
But this did get me wondering which was the saddest death of a TV character; who were you most sorry to have seen ‘written out of the series’? Interestingly, most people I posed this question to immediately stumped for Adriana on The Sopranos, despite the fact that the actress who played her was leaving to co-star in Joey with Matt LeBlanc! Others mentioned U-Turn on Weeds, and Omar, Stringer Bell and Proposition Joe on The Wire. ‘They’re all great,’ I said, ‘but can you think of any sad deaths of characters who aren’t drug dealers?’
Molly on A Country Practice, Colonel Blake on M*A*S*H, Jimmy Smits on NYPD Blue, Maude Flanders on The Simpsons. High-profile deaths each and every one, but I missed all of them (I stopped watching The Simpsons around the time Channel Ten gave ‘Mr Plow’ its 100th screening). The annals of Buffy and Lost feature dozens of discontinued characters, but both are shows I’m yet to tackle, much to the disgust of many of my friends. Nor did I witness the controversial death of Valerie in Valerie, perhaps the most famous instance of a character being killed off because the actor asked for too much money; or that of Dirty Den on EastEnders, perhaps the most famous instance of a character being killed off because the actor had been filmed having a wank on the Internet. I realise now that I have been out of the room when almost all of the most famous TV deaths were taking place.
The first significant TV death I can recall seeing was that of Jon Pertwee’s dandyish Third Doctor on Dr Who. He just keeled over, after roundly defeating an evil race of enormous and unconvincing spiders. But the mourning was short-lived, as he immediately ‘regenerated’ into the, frankly superior, Tom Baker. Sometimes a character would simply ‘leave the series’, as with The Dukes of Hazzard’s ‘dipstick’ deputy, Enos, who immediately regenerated into the, frankly inferior, Cletus (fortunately, this misstep would be corrected when Enos’s spin-off series, Enos, failed to catch on. Enos quietly returned to Hazzard County and it was never mentioned again).
Sadly, the first actual death of a series regular I can recall was when Ugly Dave Gray as ‘Bunny’ (proprietor of Bunny’s) suffered what is always described as ‘a massive heart attack’ on The Young Doctors. Years later, I would relive the trauma when Ugly Dave carked it again, his teeth still clamped round a massive cigar, on Frontline. In the seventies, fictional deaths were constantly overshadowed by shock real-life deaths of TV stars: Pete Duel from Alias Smith and Jones (shot himself), Richard Beckinsale from Porridge (heart attack), Freddie Prinze from Chico and the Man (shot himself) and ‘Morph’ from Take Hart (trodden on by Tony Hart).
In the eighties, I remember Patrick Duffy as Bobby Ewing being run down by a car on Dallas. It was a big shock, especially to those of us who still saw him as the Man From Atlantis, but there was even more outrage the following year when it was revealed that series eight had all been a dream and that Bobby was still alive. As with the JFK assassination for an earlier generation, this was the moment when many of us ‘lost our innocence’; no longer could we trust our oldest friend, television. A reverse rug-pull occurred a decade later when, in the final episode of Roseanne, we learned that John Goodman’s Dan Conner had in fact died in an earlier series. Goodman himself has since completely disappeared, creating the impression that his entire career was a dream.
Nowadays, it’s quite normal for sitcom characters to drop off the twig – George’s fiancé on Seinfeld, Chris Morris on The IT Crowd, Charlie Sheen on Two and a Half Men (sorry, that’s a dream of mine) – but, in 1989, it was still a jaw-dropper when the entire cast of Blackadder Goes Forth copped it in the trenches. That sort of thing just didn’t happen. Are You Being Served? hadn’t wound up with the staff of Grace Bros dying in a plane crash while en route to Majorca.
Leland Palmer’s death on Twin Peaks in the early nineties still strikes me as one of the most harrowing; Phil Hartman’s on NewsRadio as one of the most poignant; and Bob Peck’s on Edge of Darkness as one of the most moving, even though, unless I’m remembering this wrongly, he turns into a tree (in the Mel Gibson remake, he’s one from the beginning). But, to me, the saddest of all TV deaths was that of chubby computer whiz Edgar Stiles on 24 – cruelly gassed to death in the fifth series – partly because they’d already nuked his poor old mum in the fourth series and partly because I hate to see a fellow nerd go down.
But then, as 24, EastEnders and Hey Hey it’s Saturday have all shown us, just because someone is dead, it doesn’t mean they won’t be back.
* Immediately after I typed that sentence, my computer froze and crashed for the first time in years. I’m taking it as a sign that she’d still like to complain.
Tony Martin is the Melbourne-based author of ‘A Nest of Occasionals’ and ‘Lolly Scramble’. Podcasts of his radio show ‘Get This’ are still available for free download at iTunes (type in: ‘Get This: Richard Marsland Lives’). Most recently, he directed new episodes of ‘The Librarians’, which returns to ABC1 on October 13.
Back
