Hulu’s Obituary and the macabre politics of urban condescension
Graham Hillard
In a 1993 short story by Tobias Wolff, an obit columnist loses his job when one of his subjects turns up alive. Though Obituary, Hulu’s blacker than black dramedy of journalistic manners, doesn’t echo Wolff precisely, its ironies are of a similar kind. To write about death all day is a dangerous business. One never knows how one’s life might change.
Starring the Irish television actress Siobhan Cullen, Obituary introduces viewers to Elvira Clancy, a death-obsessed sociopath with a flair for the dangling participle. “While smashing her bully’s skull on the credenza,” a young Elvira writes for a school assignment, “surprise took hold.” Try again. Things are no better, alas, when our heroine grows up to land the obit beat at the small-town Kilraven Chronicle. “Your words screech when they should sing,” editor Hughie Burns (David Ganly) complains. Having encountered an excerpt or two over the course of the series, audiences are likely to agree.
IN THE CURSE, NATHAN FIELDER PULLS HIS TRICKS ON HIMSELF
Yet purple prose is among the least of the obstacles facing a cub reporter in the Irish hinterlands. A model of post-industrial decline, Kilraven is pre-hipster Detroit with a slather of Mississippi mud. Population 5,000 and falling, it nevertheless produces a mere three deaths a month, meager work for a journalist recently forced to go freelance. When, in one of the show’s rare forays into realism, Elvira asks Hughie for financial advice, his response (“Maybe you should start killing people”) is a thoughtless bit of blarney. It is a mark of Obituary’s general zaniness that Hughie’s protege not only takes him seriously but proceeds within days to push an elderly man off a cliff. As the show’s near-constant voice-over narration assures us, Elvira sees death as an emotional lodestar. If murder is what it takes to keep bread on the table, well, she’s up to the challenge.
For exactly one episode, Hulu’s new series pulls off this silliness with something approaching panache. Wonderfully dour in the leading role, Cullen is almost convincing as a lethal Wednesday Addams, strewing victims in her wake as she clings to the knowledge economy’s bottom rung. Also good are Michael Smiley and Danielle Galligan as, respectively, Elvira’s father and friend, lovable screwups who keep our protagonist chained to small-town life in the first place.
The problems begin when Hulu’s production attempts to stack a further five episodes atop its deliciously weird pilot. Created by first-time showrunner Ray Lawlor, Obituary might have worked as a 47-minute short film juxtaposing economic necessity and the macabre. Instead, the series offers up half a dozen helpings of increasingly cold narrative porridge, turning from an inexplicable missing-immigrant subplot on the one hand to shots of Elvira grinning evilly on the other. Like a backward joke, the show tells its punchline first. The rest — overlong, repetitive, and dreary — feels like so much setup.
Further weakening Obituary’s chances is the series’s strange lack of certainty about its own ideas. If Showtime’s Dexter, an obvious influence, existed in a heightened version of our own moral world, Hulu’s latest takes place in a realm of utter confusion. Are we meant to cheer as Elvira dispatches strangers in pursuit of a living wage? Or is our heroine the ugly helpmeet of “late-stage capitalism,” sacrificing lives to Moloch because she, like us, has no other choice? For a while, the series tries to clarify things by having Elvira kill only those who “deserve” it. Yet even this rule collapses beneath a straw. By the time our heroine began stalking a neighborhood pro-lifer, I was rolling my eyes so hard my head hurt.
Indeed, Obituary is perhaps most notable for exactly this dramatic confusion, a state of affairs that proceeds inevitably from the program’s design. To show Elvira tracked down and punished would be out of sorts with the series’s prevailing tone: nihilist comedy with traces of left-liberal social critique. But since Elvira kills her first victim 19 minutes into the pilot, neither can the show build toward that narrative extreme. The result is a program that offers little in the way of storytelling coherence, settling instead for an all-purpose cruelty. Thirty years have passed since Wolff turned his own obituary plot into a small humanistic masterpiece. Have we really fallen as far as this in the interim?
What Obituary does provide, with no small success, is a lesson in comparative politics. Rightly afraid of the Electoral College, American liberals mock the heartland with relative gentleness, lest vengeful Iowans take up their pitchforks. Irish leftists, riding popular majorities, have no such scruples. This is not to argue, of course, that U.S. television will always go easy on, say, exurban Des Moines. But Obituary’s scorn for its own people is startling to behold. The real Ireland has a per capita GDP that far exceeds America’s. Hulu’s Kilraven produces little economic activity besides lining up for the dole. The real Ireland is rain-soaked but beautiful. Obituary’s Emerald Isle is the South Bronx without the charm.
In short, Hulu’s new series is Irish television made by Irishmen who hold Ireland in disdain. I suppose there’s an audience for that sort of thing, but I’d just as soon not meet them.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Graham Hillard is a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer and editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.