Pop Psychology and Pathos: Grief in Contemporary American Television

I often wonder how people grieving death are filmed. Witnessing someone grieve usually means that one is privy to them at their most vulnerable, and in a state of surrender to all kinds of inexplicable and erratic behaviour. If filming grief can be thought of as an extractive process, then perhaps it can be argued that grief has the potential to generate unparalleled empathy for the person grieving. Because death is something each one of us will encounter, it creates a baseline for which other kinds of emotional exchanges can take place. Well-intentioned storytellers hope that these emotional exchanges can transcend regions, countries, continents as well as cultural differences, and can help people understand each other better. This can be through fiction or non-fiction, cinema or television, news or YouTube, Instagram or TikTok.

In recent years, long-form storytelling on television and OTT has emerged as one of the most potent spaces for exploring grief. Having more mileage with characters gives storytellers the chance to reveal the effects of emotional bruises slowly and in myriad ways. But off-late, stories about grief have also acquired an undercurrent of urgency. The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting immediacy and randomness of death—both in our physical spaces and online ones—has left us asking questions, trying to make sense of it somehow. In this vein, three shows—The Bear (2022-present, Jio Hotstar), Somebody Somewhere (2022-2024, Jio Hotstar) and Shrinking (2023-present, Apple TV)—can be read as responding to the seemingly insurmountable weight of dealing with the death of a loved one.

All three shows flit between being comedies and dramas, with The Bear taking the title of being “almost comedy but not really”. The Bear is about Carmy, a professional chef, taking over his elder brother라이브 바카라 barely-functioning restaurant in Chicago called ‘The Beef’, after the latter dies by suicide. It involves him dealing with the repercussions of attempting to transform what is essentially a family and friends-run business into a fine dine restaurant. In the first season, the show is mostly filmed through Carmy라이브 바카라 point-of-view, which often materializes as an anxious and high-tension act. In subsequent seasons, this tone is experimented with as other supporting characters get their own episodes. Nevertheless, the narrative momentum in each of the seasons builds towards the possibility of an explosion from Carmy. In seasons one and two, this explosion is shot in single-take heavy episodes, as all hell breaks loose in managing orders at the restaurant. In season one, we only know that Carmy라이브 바카라 brother Michael was an addict who didn’t want Carmy to join The Beef, supposedly because he also dealt drugs as a side hustle. This is what forced Carmy to become a professional chef. But once Michael's death forces Carmy to return to the restaurant, Carmy라이브 바카라 relationship with cooking is slowly revealed, over three seasons, as informed by deep psychological scars. Grieving his brother allows him to confront both his traumas as well as past actors in them, which include his brother, his mother and his ex-boss. The series therefore mimics the structure of therapy in certain ways, where healing is a Sisyphean task, perpetually held hostage to an impending crisis that can derail everything. Because Carmy is prone to being self-destructive, the audience is always suspicious of anything happy happening to him, as it could go up in flames the next moment, sometimes literally.

If the central question keeping the audience hooked in The Bear is “when will Carmy heal?” Somebody Somewhere asks a different question—“when will Sam break?” Unlike The Bear, which borrows its anxious energy from the space of the hot kitchen, Somebody Somewhere is set in the languid towns, counties and farms of Kansas. It follows Sam as she returns to her hometown to care for her sister Holly, who is diagnosed with cancer. Like The Bear, the series begins after Holly has already died, but it does not seem interested in the past. It features characters not picking up the pieces after the death of a loved one, but on the verge of moving on. Cancer, after all, like all slow illnesses, does not hit you like a lightning bolt. It allows you to begin grieving while the body of your loved one slowly withers away, as hospital procedures and medicine charts become part of your mundanity. Somebody Somewhere looks at life slowly transitioning from the old mundane to a new one. We witness Sam make new friends, mend her relationship with her other sister, and find a romantic partner. Grief in this series does not haunt (there are no flashbacks), it sneaks up on Sam and her family every now and then, only to unravel deeper layers in relationships between those who are still alive. In each of the three seasons, having seven episodes of around thirty minutes each, you aren’t really watching these characters as much as hanging out with them. The show resists the urge to have that one dramatic outburst that will show Sam breaking. But that is the central deceit, because she라이브 바카라 always hanging on, holding on.

Shrinking, the third show in this selection, is set up to respond to the question—“What if your therapists needed therapy?” It follows Jimmy as he recovers from the death of his wife in a tragic accident, and tries to regain control of his life. When all other coping mechanisms fail, he turns to his patients, breaching ethical boundaries and getting directly involved in their lives outside of therapy sessions. To all of us who wondered before going into therapy, “The therapist will not solve my problems, so why should I waste my time?” Jimmy offers action-oriented services and not merely reflective ones. In his personal life, Jimmy always seems to be surrounded by well-wishers who see through his new approach and caution him, telling him to fix his relationship with his daughter instead. The show captures Jimmy as he gets into tricky situations because of his attempt to blur the lines between personal and professional lives. Unlike the attempt to weave big questions into the everyday texture of the characters in Somebody Somewhere, or fixate on the visceral aspects of dealing with trauma in The Bear, Shrinking tries to find a more familiar path between pop psychology and pathos. So, the characters in the show frequently give and receive life advice from those in their friend, family and professional circles, with Harrison Ford라이브 바카라 Paul especially being a highlight when he says, “Fucked-up people are good at helping fucked-up people.” Grief, the show suggests, makes you aware of strengths and weaknesses you never realized you had, like thinking about forgiving the drunk driver responsible for killing your wife. This helps you not only be a better person, but also a better therapist.

Reflecting on the three shows together makes one think about how the spaces that the central characters reside in aid them in their journey. Despite the dysfunctional relationships in his life, the city of Chicago allows Carmy to access support systems in his family, friend and professional circles. Similarly, for Sam, a close-knit circle of friends, who are involved with the local clergy, surprisingly becomes a source of tenderness and strength. In Shrinking, the professional and the personal deeply intertwine specifically with respect to therapy, as the suburban setting becomes the backdrop for frequent get-togethers over food and drinks. Time, thus, allows space to slowly emerge in these shows, nurturing the characters—sometimes through tough love, sometimes through crises, but mostly because a space offers the familiarity needed to organically build a routine where the central characters can anchor themselves, and rely on certain people.

And yet, watching these shows while being situated outside the Western world is also an exercise in realising that time and space are not a given. For a lot of the world, grief today is, overwhelmingly, a question of scale. As lives in thousands are cut short by war and extreme climate change, shows set in America that deal with grief can sometimes also feel tone-deaf. A major plot point in Shrinking, for example, is about a young Black war veteran dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder after serving in Afghanistan. While the first season mostly deals with him coming to terms with his trauma, the second season allows both him and his father enough time to start understanding each other. The healing process in this character arc is highly individualized, without any serious questions being raised about the cost of American foreign policy. On the contrary, he encourages another character to join the army as a way to secure some employment. The show doesn’t mention how many people he might have killed, as he slowly gets accepted in a social circle of rich people. What of the grief of those who remain off-screen, and speak a different language? What of those who do not know which family member they should prepare to grieve for next? We are bombarded with images of grief online on a daily basis, where we have the power to flick our thumb and move on to a different image. In such an ecosystem, it becomes necessary to always ask whose grief is afforded tenderness. If time is what is needed to really come to terms with grief, what of those who do not have time?

Piyush Chhabra is a Ph.D Scholar of Cinema Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He works on the entanglements between law and different media forms.