Showtime Shocks With Ordinary Death

It is not a spoiler to say that Maria Lencioni dies at the end of Showtime’s Time of Death. It’s the first thing we learn about her. A strong-willed, sarcastic 48-year-old single mom in Soquel, Calif., Maria has terminal breast cancer and scant months left. Her dying is tragic, terrifying and heartbreaking. But it’s also simply hard friggin’ work.

Maria’s bucket list is not about skydiving or travel. She has exhausting treatments. She has bills. She has an estranged ex-husband to deal with. She has two teenagers whom she’s trying to set up in the legal custody of their older half sister. She’s preparing herself to die while preparing her kids to live. “The kids have still got a little way to go,” she says, just weeks before her death. “So I can’t go yet.”

Time of Death (premiering Nov. 1), a wrenching, remarkable six-part documentary, captures a universal experience that TV rarely shows: mundane, nonviolent death. Maria’s story is the through line, but it also visits the deathbeds of a wide range of patients, ages 19 to 77, who are dying of ALS, heart failure and cancer. Children say goodbye to parents and parents to children. Subjects die painfully or peacefully, and take stock of lives that were long and full or unjustly short. But there’s a common thread, as one grieving daughter puts it: “It’s not pretty. It’s scary, it’s ugly, and it hurts to watch.”

Death on TV is not exactly rare. AMC’s guts-spattered zombie series The Walking Dead drew over 20 million viewers for its Season 4 premiere. Shootings and serial killers abound. Life is cheap on TV, or rather death is–it’s plentiful, showy, devoid of realism or consequence. But ordinary death is a blank spot in our pop memory, one we’ve filled with monsters and explosions. After a steady diet of Hollywood deaths, real ones–the labored breathing, the body becoming a slack husk–seem uncanny, alien.

Time of Death may be shocking for what it shows, but Maria’s story takes a familiar TV form: the family drama. (The series is from Magical Elves, the production company behind Top Chef, and while Showtime avoids calling it reality TV, the term is more fitting here than in 99% of what bears the name.) Maria is a Roseanne-like TV heroine–tough, feisty, with a tart sense of humor. Admitted into an experimental trial, she exclaims, “Women would die to get that spot–literally!” and laughs. Her older daughter, Nicole (nicknamed Little), is 25 and just figuring out her own life when she must become responsible for her mom’s care. Younger daughter Julia lashes out at Little and Maria; Andrew, the youngest child, tries to take the fighting stoically.

Time of Death gives its stories structure, but it doesn’t tie them up neatly. Families come together or fracture. People make peace or get angry. They say goodbye or make it to the bedside too late. They offer words of comfort that go wrong. And at the end, there’s a body to remove, a house to clean. As one hospice worker says, “There is no manual for how to do this.”

I’m guessing you don’t want to watch this. Why would you? The show is quiet and dignified, but it can still feel invasive, even when the patients explain that they want this story told because they haven’t seen it elsewhere. (The filming stops when the subjects request it; some of them even carry cameras.) The final episode includes 19-year-old Nicolle Kissee, who dies of melanoma in her childhood bedroom–and I’ll be honest, it wrecked me. At one point in my binge watch, I put on The Walking Dead to give myself a break. Never has cartoonish, stylized, totally fake death been more welcome.

Yet while I can’t say I enjoyed watching Time of Death, I was glad to have watched it. I found myself wishing that I’d seen it before my father died. It’s cathartic to witness that life does go on (one of many clichés the show renders meaningful). Time of Death could open up a taboo of polite society the way PBS’s An American Family did for domestic dysfunction. As Maria says, death is “the big elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about.”

Time of Death does, and in the process it asks: What do you consider a good death? What will you value at the end? How will you want to be remembered? It’s not important that this show reminds you that you’re going to die. You knew that. What matters is that it reminds you to live.