The 10 Most Comforting TV Episodes About Death

My 12-year-old miniature schnauzer Czerny died earlier this month. As friends here know, he wasn’t just my puppy — he was my support dog and my best friend. Philip and I had two dogs before Czerny, and both brought something wonderful to our lives, but Czerny was special. He had a joie de vivre and a sense of wonder that were infectious. Every meal was the best meal. Every walk was the best walk. Every trip was the best trip. We adopted Czerny in early 2009, shortly after I was diagnosed with degenerative autoimmune disease. He was with me when my health started to decline in 2011, and when it dramatically worsened in 2016 and 2017. Eventually, as my world got smaller, as my life was forced into a very predictable routine, I began to see the world through Czerny’s eyes, and it brought me new purpose and vitality. I came to realize that sameness doesn’t have to be sad or dull — that you can still greet a familiar day with an eager heart.

Czerny would console me when I was in pain, and entertain me when I wasn’t. He would sense I was having a flare-up even before I myself did, and he’d rejoice that it was waning while I was still too medicated to notice. Our bond grew so deep — his vet said she’d never seen a doggy and daddy so in tune — that I used to say, without humor, that when he eventually passed, I expected to die of a broken heart a day later, much like Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds. It’s been two weeks since we said goodbye to Czerny, and despite my predictions (and to Philip’s relief), I’m still here. But the grief remains overwhelming. I’m no longer numb from the suddenness of his passing; all I’m left with is emptiness and loss.

So let’s talk about death, shall we?

What TV can you turn to when you’re mourning? Not as distraction, but as comfort. What TV episodes talk about loss in a way that helps at a time like this? Which ones allow you to see a path forward, or offer up some understanding of life’s mysteries, or help you prepare for your own inevitable passing? I’m not talking about the shows that merely give you a good cry — in particular, I won’t be eulogizing the TV episodes where a real life actor passes away, and their death is written into the series. That’s the TV equivalent of all the people who tweeted me after Czerny passed, “My dog Skippy died when I was 10, and I’m still not over it.” Thank you, I share your loss and your pain, but it doesn’t help. And I’m not talking about shows that mine death for laughs. Like Mary Richards, I've had a few irreverent moments at funerals, but “inappropriate humor” isn’t going to give me peace of mind right now, so we won’t be sending in (Chuckles) the clown.

Instead, here are 10 episodes about death that I find genuinely comforting. Because this is probably not the first of my essays you’ve read, you’ll expect them to be an odd bunch — and I hope you won’t be disappointed. And I’m unveiling the list in an order that seems random, but has in fact a logic and pattern known only to its creator (in this case, me), which seems wholly appropriate under the circumstances.

”The First Day of the Last Decade of the Entire Twentieth Century,” Designing Women (1990): It’s the double-length episode in which Charlene Frazier Stillfield (Jean Smart) gives birth. It feels padded, with one dream sequence that’s annoying and unnecessary — but in terms of what it has to say about life and death, it’s irreproachable. Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, the show’s creator, uses the episode’s hospital setting to assert the concept of The Big Circle: that as one life ends, another begins. A door closes, and a door opens. (The approach worked so well that the following season, when the writers needed to write off Hal Holbrook’s recurring character, they used much the same method, and even titled the episode “The Big Circle.”) Because the main attraction is the birth of Charlene‘s daughter Olivia, Bloodworth-Thomason is charged with making the other plotline, the death of a guest character we’ve only just met, feel significant rather than inconsequential, and uplifting rather than mournful — and she succeeds beautifully. She stacks the deck pretty well, it must be noted. The elderly woman is one Miss Minnie, who’s 102 years old. She was admitted to the hospital days earlier with congestive heart failure; she should’ve died that night, we’re told, but instead she’s still chatting away. Miss Minnie has outlived her entire family, including her husband and all five of her children — but she still takes pride in their accomplishments. (Her father, a former slave, founded the first African-American Baptist church; her nephew worked for Martin Luther King.) And although she has her regrets — “I thought as I got older, the bold outlines of truth would be revealed to me, but it hasn't happened” — she’s glad to be going home. She’s lived a fuller life than most of us can even imagine — and even though her family is long gone, she dies surrounded by new friends who’ve come to care about her. Her life was reverberant and rewarding, and her death is swift — it’s the fate we all dream about. And through the sort of flight of fancy that only a great showrunner can pull off, a vision of Dolly Parton — Charlene’s “guardian movie star” — is there to escort Miss Minnie to her final rest. Their long walk down a hospital corridor, as Miss Minnie disappears into the pale moonlight, is an image that’s haunted me for decades — and it underscores a concept that, I suspect, resonates with us all. My friend Jason, who lost his wife to cancer in 2018, recently adopted a puppy. It’s been lovely to see Jason re-emerge with renewed vigor, with King at his side. When Czerny was diagnosed with cancer in early May, Jason sent me the sweetest note of condolence, and I wrote back to thank him, and to tell him how much the recent pics of him and his new pup had cheered me. And that sometimes, there’s nothing more comforting than getting a glimpse of The Big Circle. I was quoting Designing Women, and Jason didn’t necessarily get the reference — but he got the idea.

“The Idol,” The Waltons (1980): “The First Day of the Last Decade of the Entire Twentieth Century” balances an A plot about birth with a B plot about death. “The Idol” goes the opposite route. On the fringes is the birth of Ben Walton and his wife Cindy’s first child. But front and center is the story of a new teacher who comes to Walton’s Mountain and befriends Elizabeth, only to reveal that she’s dying of a brain tumor. In some ways, “The Idol” is a return to the format of the first few seasons of The Waltons, when a parade of strangers would turn up on Walton’s Mountain in need of refuge or salvation, and the family would nurse them with the healing power of love. Except here it isn’t the teacher in need of healing; it’s Elizabeth herself. Hazel Lamphere (Susan Krebs, in a performance that manages to be both radiant and restrained) is the teacher we all dreamed of having; like Miss Minnie, she’s made pretty darn perfect. She has a bucket list before there were bucket lists, and she entertains and inspires Elizabeth with tales of her travels to far-off lands, and her appreciation for modern art. (“I used to live in the museums in New York.”) She even manages to instill in Elizabeth a few life lessons. Which makes it all the sadder when she has to confess, “I wish we had years of adventures to share, but we still have a couple of months.” How do you enjoy the time remaining, when you know it’s limited? How do you put aside your grief and focus on the moment? Elizabeth can’t bring herself to do it. She’s even refusing to go to school; the sight of Hazel is too painful. It falls to her brother Jason to provide a little clarity: “It’s not right to mourn for Hazel when she’s still alive. Remember how you felt when Grandpa died, and you didn’t have a chance to say goodbye to him? You have that chance with Hazel now.” “The Idol” looks at death from two perspectives: that of the person facing their own mortality, and that of the person being left behind. Given The Waltons’ occasional lapses into sentimentality, it could’ve come off as cloying or cheesy, but writer Juliet Law Packer knows exactly where to mine the humor, the grit and the wisdom. In the final scene, as Hazel is teaching her class the facts of life (in the most delicate, G-rated manner), she remarks that a baby kicking is often seen as a sign that he or she is “ready for the next great adventure.” Corabeth Godsey, the town’s self-proclaimed doyenne, laments, “I would hardly call this veil of tears an adventure” — and at that moment, Elizabeth shows up and insists, “I would.” Gratified by Elizabeth’s presence, and the acceptance and understanding it implies, Hazel smiles and sighs, “So would I,” then continues: “Life is the most extraordinary adventure we know so far. And if we’ve been lucky enough to share it with friends, then when the time comes to die, we know we’ve lived fully, and are ready for the next great adventure.” I first saw this episode when I was 20, and in some morbid post-adolescent fever, decided I wanted it viewed at my funeral. I still do. And I hope, when that day comes, I’ll have been true to its message.

“The Ground Beneath Their Feet,” Bull (2018): Since the dawn of television, writers have been charged with finding new and surprising ways of killing off characters. Sometimes they fall face down in a bowl of chicken soup and drown (Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman); sometimes they tumble down an empty elevator shaft (L.A. Law). Bull manages not only one of the most shocking deaths, but one of the most moving — and it manages the latter without resorting to the traditional scenario designed to garner sympathy: the memorial service where everyone takes turns eulogizing the dead. (The Judging Amy entry “Requiem,” which writes off and celebrates the late Richard Crenna, is a fine example of that trope, and an episode well worth watching, but as noted, it’s the kind of “celebrity death” I’m choosing not to include here.) Death is ubiquitous in “The Ground Beneath Their Feet”: one character has cheated it, another is facing it, and a third meets their maker in the opening shot. The titular character, trial scientist Dr. Jason Bull, has just returned to work after suffering a near-fatal heart attack. But the experience hasn’t softened him; it’s only strengthened his resolve to make his business profitable at any cost, and he’s offered the firm’s services to a pharmaceutical company whose motives are far from altruistic. A young woman is badly in need of a liver transplant, and the insurance company is refusing to cover the costs, arguing that there are other potential recipients with a greater chance of long-term survival. And Bull’s team is charged with denying a wife and mother the liver that could save her life. The resulting court case is an engrossing one, with unforeseen ambiguities, and twists that feel rooted in character and grounded in the law. While in a subplot, the team’s supersleuth Danny James is searching for a missing colleague, hacker extraordinaire Cable McCrory. (Annabelle Attanasio, who played Cable, had decided to leave the series upon receiving an offer to direct a feature film. We're tipped off to the manner of Cable's departure in the very first scene, but because we don’t yet know that she’s gone missing — or even that the actress herself is leaving the show — we don’t recognize it as a clue. It’s a shrewd sleight of hand that allows us, when the truth is revealed, to be just as shocked as her colleagues.) Both plots reach devastating climaxes, then merge unexpectedly, and the episode manages a closing scene that, in its hopefulness, takes your breath away. It’s one more conjuring trick you never saw coming. Because in the end, “Ground Beneath Their Feet,” from (then) showrunner Glenn Gordon Caron, isn’t about life’s random cruelties; it’s about the epiphanies that follow them. Death is awful and arbitrary and senseless, but sometimes we can pull something good from it. And if we’re lucky, we can pay it forward.

“The Good Death,” Cold Case (2007): Czerny had six good weeks after surgery, but we were cautioned early on that hemangiosarcoma is the most aggressive cancer in dogs, and that when the end came, it might be sudden and swift. The end came on June 3. We knew he’d been having a tough day, but he’d had other tough days, so we prayed it would pass. But by 8 PM, he had stopped eating. By 10 PM, he couldn’t seem to move. I put in a frantic call to the animal hospital, and mercifully, the vet we knew best and trusted most happened to be there working late, and said she would wait until we brought Czerny in. The diagnosis was not good, nor was his prognosis: he had had a major bleed from which he wouldn’t recover. Philip cradled Czerny in his arms as the doctor performed the final procedure, and I held his paw and sang a lullaby that always used to soothe him when he was unwell. I remarked to friends afterwards that if there’s such a thing as a “good death,“ this was it. And maybe when I chose that phrase, I was thinking of this episode. Gavin Harris’s “The Good Death,” from Cold Case’s stellar fourth season, casts Anthony Starke as Jay Dratton, a smiling cobra who died years earlier of an inoperable brain tumor. When a nurse confesses to five mercy killings, Detective Lilly Rush and her colleagues begin to suspect that Dratton’s death might not have been as straightforward as it seemed — he died months before anticipated — and dig into the decade-old case. Starke is sensational as a corporate monster who finds his way back to the man he once was. Along the way, as Dratton’s mind keeps slipping into half-remembered images, director Paris Barclay manages some of the most graceful match shots in the show's run, the present bleeding into the past and back again with eerie elasticity. Ultimately, we learn that the killing was indeed an act of compassion, but not in the way we expected, and we’re grateful for the intervention -- and doubly grateful when Lilly (whose neglectful mother is facing her own final days) decides, just this once, to look the other way. The closing montage is set to Paul Westerberg's haunting "Good Day," and it's sublime. “The Good Death” seems at first like it’s going to be a viewer’s revenge fantasy: the evil industrialist and the rotten mother who get what’s coming to them. But in the end, it turns out to be a story about love, forgiveness, redemption and unexpected kindness. It doesn’t get more comforting than that.

“My Dinner With Andrew,” Touched by an Angel (1997): The television landscape has been littered with so many shows about souls in need of saving. In the ‘80s, there was Highway to Heaven. A decade later, Touched by an Angel, and a decade after that, Ghost Whisperer. “My Dinner with Andrew,” by Touched by an Angel showrunner Martha Williamson, freshens familiar tropes by upending the show’s format. Here, the two stars — Roma Downey and Della Reese — are relegated to supporting roles, as the case at hand is handed to one of the featured players, John Dye. Andrew, the Angel of Death, is instructed to show up at a bachelor auction, where a scientist, Dr. Kate Calder, wins a evening with him. (It's Stephanie Zimbalist, and she’s splendid.) Kate, who’s known for a long time that she has an incurable illness, has grown selfish and short-sighted. She sees her research into gene sequences in terms of the accolades it will bring her; she’s opposed to sharing her data and discoveries, even if it could mean saving lives. (In Touched by an Angel parlance, she needs to learn that her plan isn't necesarily God's plan.) During their dinner together, Andrew tries to open her eyes to the possibility of a higher power — and to accepting that possibility, as people do, based on faith alone. Riffing on Plato's Cave, he describes heaven as the ultimate reality: “Imagine that you are locked in a closet for years. Now during this incarceration, you have a baby. You hope to get out, right? — but you don’t know. So you start drawing pictures of birds and trees and dogs, to show this baby of yours who has never seen what life is like out in the real world. So imagine that one day this baby comes and says, ‘You know, gee, houses and birds and trees and dogs are all pretty small and flat, aren’t they?’ And you realize that no matter how hard you try to draw these pictures, you can never get this baby of yours to even imagine what reality looks like. Never. Not until he sees it for himself. So in the meantime, you tell this child that you love him — and you ask him to trust you.” Their evening together includes an unlikely visitor, a near-death experience, a laboratory accident, a carbon monoxide scare, and ultimately, a change of heart that feels well earned. (There’s even time for Della Reese to belt out a tune.) Near the end, Kate, who’s come to understand the value of scientific collaboration, confirms with Andrew that she has more time than she once thought: “So I still have a few more years left, huh?” “Yes, you do, and now you know what to do with them.” “And when they’re over?” she wonders. “When they’re over,” he responds, and finds the right words instantly: “I’ll see you for dinner.” And he walks away smiling. “My Dinner with Andrew” is about finding new purpose in the face of death. It’s about what God expects of us, what he has in store for us, and trusting in His plan. And in case you don’t believe in God, it’s about a handsome man whisking you off to dinner at the end of the day.

“Jennifer and the Will,” WKRP in Cincinnati (1981): WKRP debuted in 1978 and instantly detonated the “dumb blonde” myth. Receptionist Jennifer Marlowe was easily the smartest and savviest person at the station; sometimes she seemed to be running it single-handedly. “Jennifer and the Will” is the rare episode that dares to ask: what can’t Jennifer handle? What’s too much? Jennifer’s elderly friend, the Colonel, has died and — because he doesn't trust his greedy relatives — appointed her executrix of his estate. (Les: “What is an executrix?” Herb: “I don’t know. High heels and a whole lot of leather.”) As the WKRP staff attempts to console Jennifer, something with which no one's had experience (she was always the one consoling others), we see what the Colonel's death — and her new responsibilities — are doing to her. Like so many of Blake Hunter's WKRP scripts, the episode is about someone having to cope outside their comfort zone, and Jennifer's response is a slow descent, from resolve to stoicism to (in the hours leading up to the funeral) despair. It's poignant and unsettling; we're not used to seeing Jennifer rattled. Her self-confidence has always been her most inspiring trait. But of course, at the lawyer's office the following day, when she sees the Colonel once again in his pre-recorded video will (a bravura performance by Pat O'Brien, and an insanely novel way to use a guest star, scoring most of his laughs after he's dead: "To my brother Cedric, I leave nothing — because he's always been an all-or-nothing type of fellow, and since he can't have it all, he gets — nothing"), when she realizes — with his hostile, useless relatives seated beside her — what's at stake and what she's fighting for, she rallies. The Colonel wants his fortune distributed among the veterans of his old unit, the Fighting 47th, including a parade in their honor. His sister objects: "A parade! I mean, really: it's insane, it's frivolous, it's —“ "Going to start around 2," Jennifer interrupts, already working out the details: "Probably last till around 7. I'm going to pick a nice summer's day when all the kids are out of school." The family warns her, "I can see we're going to have a fight on our hands," and recharged, she counters, calmly, "Just as big as you'd like to make it." And of course Jennifer will prevail, because that's what she does. “Jennifer and the Will“ assures us that if we’re the ones left behind, we’ll get through it with a little help from our friends. But more than that, it asserts our power from beyond the grave. After we’re gone, the people who matter to us will continue to look out for us — plus we can have our revenge on the people we hate. I find that very comforting.

“The Trouble With Templeton,” The Twilight Zone (1960): Well, if I were going to turn to Twilight Zone episodes, it would be awfully easy to choose Earl Hamner’s “The Hunt.” After all, that’s the episode that insists that daddies and doggies go to the same heaven, and that, should evil forces try to lure us to The Bad Place, it’s our savvy pets who’ll save us. And I am totally down with that sentiment, but it’s hardly a revelation; I’m fully expecting to be reunited with Czerny someday. “The Trouble With Templeton,” perhaps a less likely choice, is about an aging actor (Brian Aherne) whose life has grown aimless since losing his wife decades earlier. For years, he’s been going through the motions, and as he begins rehearsals for his latest play, he seems almost determined to self-destruct. (A young Sydney Pollack is wonderful as a hotshot director who has no regard for Templeton’s credits and no patience for his eccentricities.) But Templeton receives an intervention from the fifth dimension — and in particular, from his late wife — that gets him back on track. As an aside, when I emailed a musician friend in mid May to let him know of Czerny’s diagnosis, he directed me to an acquaintance who works as an Animal Communicator. He cautioned me that although he was the last person to buy into that sort of thing, he’d seen her at work and was now a believer. I’ve since spoken with her a handful of times, and to be honest, I have no idea whether she’s psychic, or merely telling me what she knows I want to hear. (Occasionally, I recall that episode of Designing Women where Julia cautions Charlene that that’s precisely what her psychic is doing, and Charlene remains undeterred: “Well, what’s so bad about that? I mean, maybe [my psychic] does just listen and let me figure out things for myself, but psychiatrists do the exact same thing. Psychics tell you things are happening because of the month you were born in; psychiatrists tell you it’s because you wet the bed when you were three.”) But the thing she said that resonated most was when she talked of all the lessons Czerny has taught me (as indeed he has), and that even now, the lessons would continue. That he’d be watching me from beyond, and if I listened closely, he’d be there to guide me. “The Trouble With Templeton,” E. Jack Neuman’s sole contribution to The Twilight Zone, insists that the ones who leave us behind don’t want us to mourn them forever; they want us to move forward, to get on with our lives. And they’re perfectly willing to intervene — even if it means ripping a hole in the fabric of time and space — if they see us faltering. The episode even promises that in time we’ll be joining them in a marvelous party, possibly with Pippa Scott doing the giddiest Charleston on record. Easily the most cynical of the shows I feature here, it’s nonetheless The Twilight Zone that offers — in this episode, at least — the most affirming message.

“The Song of Rome,” Picket Fences (1995): A priest is shot in the confessional by a 19-year-old with an Uzi, who needs fast funds to feed his gambling addiction. That’s the first scene in Act I. And the rest of David Kelley’s teleplay is about a town searching for its soul. “The Song of Rome“ isn’t just an episode about violence and death; it’s about how we’ve become desensitized to violence and death. It’s about holding tight to one’s moral compass in an immoral universe. It addresses the question of whether there’s more good than bad in this world, and boldly, leaves it unanswered. And because it’s creator David Kelley’s last episode as showrunner, he even takes a moment to reflect upon the show’s title, and how it embodies the themes he’s explored over the previous three seasons. Late in the episode, Sheriff Jimmy Brock and Judge Henry Bone (Tom Skerritt and Ray Walston, respectively) run into each other on a residential block. There they are, the town’s chief proponents of law and order, and they take a moment to reflect on the picket fence that envelops the house before them. Those picket fences were the first thing Brock noticed when he moved to town. Bone muses, “When I was a boy, our next-door neighbor had one. Their lawn was always so manicured. Their house was so beautiful and neat. I never knew what to make of that fence. Was it to keep the beauty in, or the strangers out? Was I supposed to notice that it was pristine and white, or that it was jagged?” “The Song of Rome” is one of two episodes that year that won Ray Walston his first Emmy Award, and although he’s particularly good in this scene, he’s even better in an earlier one, in which the local DA barges into his office and demands that he recuse himself from the case. Bone’s son has died only recently, under similar circumstances. “Give yourself a chance to survive,” the DA begs him, and Bone responds, with fierce outrage, “How dare anybody survive this?” “The Song of Rome” doesn’t just capture a sense of loss that seems insurmountable; it understands that sometimes, it feels the only way to properly honor that loss is by not surmounting it. That the town’s sense of hopelessness is ultimately assuaged by a children’s pageant should feel like the crummiest copout, but it’s beautifully handled, as the core characters, in spite of themselves, come to recognize that their feelings of grief and anger aren’t diminished by allowing for moments of pleasure and pride — that one of the ways we get through the darkness is by making a choice to let the light in. Like another stellar TV episode, Joan of Arcadia‘s “Friday Night” (also worth a watch), it insists that we’re fully capable of juggling multiple emotions. And that that’s crucial to our capacity to cope and carry on.

“Things to Do in Phoenix When You’re Dead,” Medium (2009): The genius of Medium is that you expect the show — based on the life of Allison DuBois, the psychic who assisted U.S. law enforcement in solving crimes — to be consumed with ghostly dreams and police investigations. But at its heart, Medium is a family drama, and one of the two or three best ones to grace the airwaves in the last few decades. Since the turn of the century, I figure we’ve had about three network dramas that accurately represented — without melodrama, without the tropes of soap opera — what the day-to-day drudgery and messy humor of family life are like. (One was Medium, and the other two were Barbara Hall’s Judging Amy and Joan of Arcadia.) And the particular brilliance of Medium — the way it weaves its procedural aspects through the family unit — can be glimpsed very clearly here in the opening two scenes: the first, in which Allison is awakened by two different nightmares, a man dying of natural causes and a women murdered by strangulation; the second, in which the entire family is gathered at the kitchen table the following morning, as Allison phones a detective colleague to describe what she “witnessed” overnight — while her husband Joe and their three children chime in with opinions and issues of their own, their lines ricocheting off each other like pinballs at a penny arcade. And because the family unit is never far from view, it follows that even in an episode like “Things to Do in Phoenix,” which features a particularly knotty case for Allison to unravel (in which she's hunting not only a killer, but a blackmailer and a ghost), there’s still room for a subplot for her eldest, Ariel, one that allows Joe to do some detective work of his own. "Things to Do" makes good use of the Medium trope where you can never tell if you're watching events play out or watching Allison dream about events that have already played out. The premise is an engaging one: a ghost who turns out not to be dead — and I’m loathe to say much more, as Diane Ademu-John’s script is one of her most cunning, with a steady stream of reversals, and a knack for propelling the plot forward by showing the same dream from multiple perspectives. Although it’s a given that someone dies in almost every episode of Medium, “Things to Do“ is an episode about death itself: about asserting our control over it, and in particular, about profiting from it. It ultimately maintains that if you don’t get things right while you’re here, you can still right them once you’ve crossed over. Like WKRP’s “Jennifer and the Will,” it’s about revenge from the hereafter. But whereas the WKRP episode basked in a warm afterglow, this one has a sting in its tail that’s wicked fun. You don’t mess with the dead, and you don’t mess with Allison DuBois. And most of all – as you can tell from the casually triumphant menace with which she delivers her final monologue – you don’t mess with Oscar and Emmy winner Patricia Arquette.

“Mistaken Motives,” Knots Landing (1982): Knots Landing ultimately became the best and longest running of the primetime soaps that flooded the airwaves in the 1980s, but the first two seasons were shaky ones, as the show struggled with format and tone. But in Season 3, the show was transformed by a cast departure that could’ve been disastrous. Don Murray, one of the original stars (and easily its biggest name), decided to move on, and the writers elected to kill off his character, Sid Fairgate. It made for a storyline where his screen wife Karen, played by Michele Lee, was dealing with sudden widowhood, and unlike most of the issues that came and went during the first two seasons, it wasn’t the sort of thing that could be made better by a quick dip in the hot tub. It set the format for the rest of the run — it allowed for slow-burner stories in a fast-paced world — and what resulted were a dozen stellar episodes about loss, grief and, ultimately, acceptance. Michele Lee was never more brilliant, as she navigates Karen’s changing moods with delicacy and precision, never lapsing into the sort of melodrama that the show would later embrace. “Mistaken Motives” is one of the least discussed Karen-centric episodes, but for those dealing with loss, it’s one of the most crucial. Ray Goldstone and Rocci Chatfield’s script asserts that we all grieve in our own time. That there’s no right or wrong way to mourn, and that however singular our responses, we’re entitled to them. And the episode reminds us, too, how awful love can feel when it has nowhere to go. Long before WandaVision insisted “what is grief, if not love persevering?” — and legions of fans wept in tandem, as if that were the first time that sentiment had been expressed — Karen laid into her daughter Diana, who had wrongly accused her of getting involved with someone new: “I love Sid Fairgate, now as much as ever. Only now he’s not here, so instead of love feeling wonderful, it hurts like hell.” When I first wrote up Knots Landing Season 3, way back in 2012, I noted, “You can pretty much depend on the fact that whatever the next episode is, it’ll be entertaining and nuanced, digging deep into character to provide fresh looks at familiar themes. You'll probably learn more about at least a few of the core characters, and you might just see a bit of yourself in there as well.” Four days after Czerny died, I was invited to attend a pet bereavement group. Space was limited, so I promised them an answer within the hour. I had no idea if it would be good for me, or too painful, or if — as sometimes happens when I get uncomfortable — my responses might be too irreverent. I asked Philip if he’d watch something on TV with me, and I put on the scene from “Mistaken Motives” where Karen is pressured into attending a bereavement group. It’s 10 or 12 people gathered in a circle, speaking mournfully about their late spouses. A woman starts to talk about receiving her husband‘s ashes (“in a thing that looked like a big Dixie cup”), and we see Karen turn away, apparently starting to tear up. The woman continues — “most people think the ashes are powdery, but they’re not“ — and Karen rushes from the room. She makes her way to a staircase and sits, her face still hidden from us, when a widower approaches. She turns to him, and she’s laughing. It all struck her as absurd. Or at the very least, she knew it wasn’t where she belonged. She and the widower end up at a coffee shop, talking about their late spouses until the wee hours of the morning. And they both feel better for having had a chance to talk about their loss in the way that they needed. “Mistaken Motives” is careful not to denigrate bereavement groups; on the contrary, this one seems like a wonderful, supportive community. It’s just not right for Karen Fairgate, not at this time – and that’s OK. When the scene was over, Philip and I looked at each other, and realized my response was almost certain to be identical to Karen’s, and I decided not to attend. Maybe next month, maybe not. But I was comforted by seeing a bit of myself on the small screen, and having a little help with a tough decision.

Enjoy reading about TV's best? Check out two similarly-styled posts: The Five Best TV Shows You Might Not Be Watching and Five Foreign TV Dramas You Shouldn't Miss. Or check out my recaps of 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. I have a new piece called "Private Faces," in praise of two spectacular series that emerged in the fall of 2020, and another entitled "Unwilling Victims," taking a look at three recent series by women and about women. Or if you enjoy detailed looks at hit shows, check out my write-ups of Voyager Season 4, Criminal Minds Season 8, Cold Case Season 4, Gilmore Girls Season 7 (and the subsequent, ill-judged Netflix miniseries), Judging Amy Season 6, and fourteen essays devoted to all the seasons of the great nighttime soap Knots Landing, starting here. I also look back at Murder, She Wrote and pick out The 10 Best "Murder She Wrote" Mysteries. Or if you have a preference for sitcoms, I serve up my 10 Best Mary Tyler Moore Show Episodes, 10 Best Designing Women episodes and 10 Best Kate & Allie episodes; delve into Rhoda Season 3, Newhart Season 7, Maude Season 2, WKRP in Cincinnati Season 4 and Bewitched Season 2; pen an appreciation of the underrated Mike & Molly; and offer up some thoughts as to why The New Adventures of Old Christine took such a tumble in quality over its five seasons.