After Life and The Widow get grief all wrong

The New Yorker

"Grief is a mainstay of much recent television, via the Gothic bathos of The Haunting of Hill House, the destabilizing absurdity of Kidding and the rich meditations of Sorry for Your Loss, and also the third season of True Detective and the ... final season of Catastrophe," says Troy Patterson. "The Widow (Amazon) and After Life (Netflix) are less explorations of grief than tepid exploitations—both shows treat bereavement as an easy way to raise the dramatic stakes but only cheapen the lives of their grieving protagonists. These are dirges arranged for easy listening."