It was bad luck any way you look at it.
You’re Jarrod “Toadfish” Rebecchi, you’ve finally married the definitely out-of-your-league Dee Bliss, and while you’re fanging down a country road in your hotted-up beige station wagon, you decide to steal a sneaky pash with your wife.
And then the car goes flying off a cliff, sending your beloved to a watery grave.
For keen Neighbours viewers in 2003, this untimely end for Dee – and accompanying cruel twist of fate for Toadie, who had finally caught a lucky break – had us glued to screens, and then to our phones, watercoolers and boxes of tissues. (We naturally had no idea that in 13 years’ time, Dee would return from the dead. Nor that she’d be a twin separated at birth with the mysterious Andrea. But that’s Neighbours for you.)
As the credits rolled, I paced around the living room trying to wrap my head around the cruelty of following this happy moment with such a tragedy. How could they bring this odd but perfect couple together, only to turf them into a mysterious inland ocean?
I was not yet wise to this classic storytelling bait and switch: the mastermind behind Dee’s demise, Shane Porteous, was awarded the Australian Writers’ Guild gong for best episode in a television serial.
Dee’s was merely one in a long and agonising history of Australian television deaths that have broken the hearts of viewers nationwide since the demise of ringleader Judy in Seven Little Australians. There was Stingray, nodding off for good at his mum’s birthday party on Ramsay Street. The godly Patrick from Offspring, surviving a car accident only to die before the birth of his and Nina’s baby. Leukaemia-stricken Molly, A Country Practice’s beloved farmer, drifting away into a fade-out as she watched her family play. And in perhaps the most devastating of recent memory, Love My Way’s Lou falls off her scooter, never to wake.
It feels like Australia particularly relishes in these deaths, but of course the phenomenon is a global one: I am, after all, a person who visited the Time & Life building in New York to “pour one out” on the sidewalk for Lane Pryce when my favourite Mad Men character was snuffed out in 2012.
Mourning a television character can seem ridiculous – Why am I crying? They weren’t real! I didn’t know them! – but can, in fact, serve a real world purpose. David Kessler, a grief expert, told TV Insider that TV deaths can help people grapple with mortality and loss in their own lives. “Any consistent exposure we can get to a loss of life not in our family can help us to begin to understand the real thing when it does happen to us,” he said.
Similarly, TV deaths can echo our own experiences, and often dredge up emotions that we’d done our best to bury. A beloved TV mum’s passing may remind us of our own bereavement. TV deaths that involve particular diseases, substances, suicide or accidents may strike a particularly true chord.
Many grief counsellors and psychologists agree: the emotions we feel when farewelling a beloved TV character are real and valid. “Human beings love stories and making connections, even if it’s to fictional people. We create meaning and then experience actual grief when that connection is broken,” Christine Manzella, who works in grief therapy, told Time magazine.
This seems especially true of long-running soaps and dramas, as viewers often quite literally spend some time every day with those characters. And, as notable moments in television grief have demonstrated – such as the passing of Sesame Street’s Mr Hooper – these storylines can even help people (particularly younger viewers) grapple with the idea of mortality in a “teachable” way.
But as “prestige television” takes characters to meet their maker with increasing frequency (and, in the case of Game Of Thrones, increasing inventiveness), TV deaths may be losing their impact both dramatically and psychologically. As television critic Emily Todd VanDerWerff cautions: “We want to believe that our fictional characters will be mourned, even if they died in a sudden, random accident, because we hope that we, too, will be mourned.”
Perhaps, whether it’s a watery end in an inland sea or a quiet fade-out in the backyard, that’s why TV deaths give us pause: they remind us we’re all on borrowed time. These moments of fictional heartbreak can spur us into action, too: we might call our loved ones after a tear-jerking season finale, get better at looking left and right before crossing the road, or finally get that mole checked out. And, please, hopefully we’ll think twice before sneaking a pash at the wheel on our wedding day.
