Television/Death

Television/Death intertwines the study of death, dying and bereavement on television with discussion of the ways that television (and the TV archive) provides access to the dead.

Section One looks at the representation of death, dying and the afterlife on television, in historical and contemporary factual television (from around the world) and in US television drama.

Section Two focuses on dramas of grief and bereavement and discusses how the long form seriality and narrative complexity of television, from family melodramas to the ghost serial, allows for an emotionally realist representation of experiences of grief, bereavement and death-related trauma.

Finally, Section Three proposes that television has been overlooked in critical analyses of recorded sounds’ and images’ propensity to ’bring back the dead’. It argues that television is the posthumous medium par excellence and looks at how the dead return via incorporation into new television programmes or through projects to bring television out of the archive.

Helen Wheatley is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. She is co-founder of the Centre for Television Histories and works collaboratively with archives and curators to engage the public with the history of British broadcasting. Her most recent book, Spectacular Television: Exploring Televisual Pleasure (2016) won the BAFTSS Award for Monograph of the Year in 2017. She has research interests in various aspects of television history and has published widely on popular genres of television drama, including the monograph Gothic Television (2006). She also has an ongoing interest in issues of television history and historiography, the topic of her edited collections Re-viewing Television History: Critical Issues in Television Historiography (2007) and Television for Women: New Directions (2016, with Rachel Moseley and Helen Wood).