1000 Ways to Die: A Televisual Template for Commodifying Tragedy and Vilifying the Deceased

ABSTRACT

Whereas sorrow and eulogizing typically accompany death, the television program 1000 Ways to Die transforms tragedy into palatable, commodified spectacle. The show shirks the traditional conventions of screen death and strings together bingeable televisual narratives of misfortune by borrowing from the historical lineage of death on television news, “mondo” films, and Internet clips featuring actual deaths. These mediated representations maximize the spectacle of death and invite schadenfreude while minimizing its tragic and human components. The gaze-inducing images of death reduce individuals to a “grotesque body” as opposed to a person. Additionally, by villainizing the deceased and constructing them as antagonists responsible for their own deaths, death itself becomes the text’s hero and restorer of karmic order.

KEYWORDS:

• Commodification
• death
• representation
• spectacle
• television

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.