Scholars educators health professionals and activists from a variety of fields have
struggled with one of the most significant questions of contemporary life: How do we rescue the
experience of death and dying from the mire of fear denial and secrecy that it has been
associated with for the better part of a century? In When Death Goes Pop Charlton D. McIlwain
describes a striking emerging shift in the way that death is represented in such omnipresent
forms of media as television - a shift that seems to be moving the American discourse on death
and dying from the private sphere to the public. The book surveys the past thirty years of
death-related television programming from daytime soaps to prime-time dramas focusing
primarily on Home Box Office's Six Feet Under and its innovative approach to the subject and
from the Sci-Fi Channel's Crossing Over to the genre of paranormal programming as a whole. This
book also discusses the increasing use of multimedia and the Internet in the funeral industry
and how the new technologies change the way that we remember the dead as they create and
sustain what we might call a «virtual community of death».
