It's a very performative thing, grief. As with so much in modern life, I think there's a whole performative layer to what we do because we feel like there's a private TV show viewing our lives.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Life is so fast these days, and we're exposed to so much information. Television makes us a witness to such misery.
Grief is at once a public and a private experience. One's inner, inexpressible disruption cannot be fully realized in one's public persona.
Sometimes it's interesting to see something that you're not used to seeing, which is the main ingredient of life, and it's removed from the usual entertainment. I think it's important to give the opportunity to people to witness the life of somebody who was not public.
In television, there's this weird sense of isolation from your audience; you kind of get this feeling that you write the show for you and your wife and your friends and the other people who work on the show. It's our little show, and then it goes out into the world, and somebody watches it.
Television is intensely personal.
When you watch someone on TV go through something that you're going through that's difficult, it lets you know that you're not alone, and there's nothing to be ashamed of.
I think people watch TV to escape from life.
I think we invite people into our living rooms every week through the television because we have emotional connections to them, or they make us laugh or reflect some part of ourselves that we want to live in.
Everything you see on screen is real. By doing what we do, there's naturally going to be a lot of grimacing. And whimpering.
Television has never known what to do with grief, which resists narrative: the dramas of grief are largely internal - for the bereaved, it is a chaotic, intense, episodic period, but the chaos is by and large subterranean, and easily appears static to the friendly onlooker who has absorbed the fact of loss and moved on.