2 out of 5

Created by: Ray Lawlor

covers season 1

About 80% of my way through Obituary’s six episode first season, I had to make a decision: stop watching, this close to the end, or start over?

…Sometimes, I’ll be trucking through a series – and this is me, as not a multi-tasker when watching TV – and realize I don’t really understand what’s going on. Or rather, I do – in Obituary, obituarist Elvira (Siobhán Cullen) takes to murdering folk as a way of keeping her in the job; meanwhile, others at the newspaper for which she works are trying to solve an old murder case – but I can’t really say much about the ‘Whys’ of it all: why the characters do what they do; why the narrative is pursuing whichever direction.

Because the show has the taint of a type of dark comedy I think I’d like, and also because Cullen is quite excellent in the lead role, I went with starting over.

About 80% of my way through, I was back with the same Whys, kind of confirming my suspicion: that Obituary, unfortunately, just isn’t a very well written show, at least structurally. It very much comes across as a joke that creator / writer Ray Lawlor couldn’t quite figure out how to make it actually support a story and not a punchline, and then with that mission somewhat accomplished, realized there were still five episodes left. I feel like this is evident via a visual quirk that the show employs in that first episode, and then almost never again: Elvira imagining obituary headlines appearing next to the townsfolk as she plots out their murders. …And then a couple episodes later, we’ll start talking about this past murder like it’s a huge event we’ve always been talking about, except it’s simultaneously placed into the background. Except Lawlor is also careful to not turn Obituary into too clear of a Dexter swipe, and so also backgrounds the actual murders and Elvira’s evolution as, essentially, a serial killer, in favor of side stories involving her father (Michael Smiley), friend (Danielle Galligan), and the journalist investigating the cold case (Ronan Raftery).

Individually, these pieces are good TV fodder, and the show is very well cast, with an excellently balanced score – between smalltown quirk and creepiness – from Steve Lynch; that’s kind of the trick that keeps you watching. But in the same way where patter is delivered like it’s funny, but you’re kind of waiting for the funny bit, the show never quite seems like it starts, only to glance behind and assume you’re laughing – assume that: oh, right, we understand Elvira’s pathology well enough to sympathize; we understand the stakes behind this murder being solved. A forcefed flashback drip regarding said murder, awkwardly stitched into the show, underlines the underwhelmingness, as it’s pretty easy to put the picture mostly together from the base context of that flashback, again leaving us to wonder if we’re missing something.

The flipside of this is that all of this narrative assuming indirectly respects the viewer’s intelligence: plot beats that would almost always get a one-line or more of explanatory exposition are allowed to pass by, and that’s… kind of refreshing! If it felt more purposeful I’d give it full credit, but it seems more like a happy accident. However, it’s definitely what makes this an easy-going watch – part of how I went through 10 episodes, twice, without any real slowdown – and when that’s paired with an engaging cast, somehow making the lack of stakes in the script sound important, it results in passable entertainment.

But, yeah, you’re probably better off watching something like Mary Kills People, or some other choose-your-poison narrator-is-a-killer series.