Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Obituary’ On Hulu, Where A Morbid Obituary Writer Kills People To Ensure She Keeps Getting Paid

There are certain shows that you need to be in the right mood to watch. In the case of a new Hulu dramedy from Ireland, we’re not even talking about being in the mood to follow along with a complicated plot. No, we’re talking about being in a mood that would make Friedrich Nietzsche go “Lighten up, Francis.”

OBITUARY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “As far back as I can remember, my life has been steeped in death.” We see what we assume is a fetus-eye view of the birth canal.

The Gist: Indeed, death has been around Elvira Clancy (Siobhán Cullen) since day one; her mother died giving birth to her. She’s soothed by death, and she found out as a kid that writing about death and all its morbid details was when she was most in her element. Of course, she was also depressed, but all the medication she was given just made her feel “more dead than alive.”

So when the obituarist for the local Kilraven Chronicle drops dead at her keyboard, Elvira knew she was a natural for the job. Her first obituary was for the just-passed obituarist. As her editor Hughie Burns (David Ganly) admonishes her for being eager to write the next one, she envisions his obituary floating in the air next to him. But she’s happy to have the job, especially because she has to support not only herself but her heavy-drinking father Ward (Michael Smiley).

Six months later, Elvira is at the funeral of her last profilee; she goes to them because she feels being dead shows people exactly who a person is. But she gets accosted by a relative who thought her obit was rubbish. “I’m just finding my voice,” she says.

Back at the office, the veteran crime reporter, Clive Cavendish (Lalor Roddy), still investigating the five-year-old unsolved murder of a German woman named Maria Riedle (Dagmar Döring), quits when Hughie tells him he has to go freelance. Hughie gives Elvira the same bad news, not just because their advertising budget is down, but because her writing is generating complaints from the families of the people she writes about. At €200 per obit, Elvira knows that people don’t die in Kilraven fast enough for her to make a proper living.

She devises a way to not only make her obits more compelling but make herself invaluable to the paper: She interviews people who are dying so she can pre-write the obits, having them ready to file as soon as she hears about their demises. Hughie still thinks her writing is too flowery.

She gets flummoxed by her next anticipated subject: Sandy Benson (Barry McGovern), “Kilraven’s Nicest Man” who has stage four cancer. She figures “because there’s no stage five,” he’s next. But he remains alive, day after day for months, taunting her by politely saying hello to her every morning as she stands on a cliff overlooking the sea. One day she confronts him and finds out he’s not so nice, and ends up pushing him off the cliff.

The perverse thrill she gets in committing this bit of manslaughter leads her to decide to off others, especially those who don’t deserve to live. Her next choice is a rich developer who seems to be using her buddy Mallory Markham (Danielle Galligan) for sex and little else; she decides to make it look like an accident, subbing his epilepsy pills for placebos and rigging up a strobe setup in the trunk of her car. But she ends up having drinks with the charming new crime reporter, Emerson Stafford (Ronan Raftery), who somehow has already met Mallory.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Six Feet Under, but somehow even darker and funnier.

Our Take: Created by Ray Lawlor, Obituary is just about the darkest black comedy we’ve seen in years, mainly because Elvira is not just obsessed with death, but she’s obsessed in a loving, curious way. So when the idea of offing people in town in order to help her earn a living writing about death occurs to her, it’s treated as more of a lark than a something horiffic.

Still, there’s dark and then there’s dark, and Obituary is dark. Elvira is almost cartoonishly in love with death, as if Wednesday Addams grew up to write obituaries for a local newspaper. We’re trying to figure out just how many people Elvira is going to kill during this first season, if she’ll feel any sort of guilt or remorse, or if the season will be just one episode after another of Elvira justifying her acts because the people she’s killing are her perception of “bad”.

The first episode was still funny in parts, though, which surprised us given just how uncomfortable we felt during most of it. We’re suspecting that Lawlor will continue to portray the village of Kilraven and as Elvira describes it in her voice over: “Behind the nothingness, there’s a ton of weird shit going on.” This way, the people that she kills aren’t going to garner sympathy; maybe Elvira isn’t necessarily doing the town a favor, but she’s not going to be shown as a transactional Angel of Death, either. Maintaining that middle ground will help keep the show into veering into the inky blackness, to the point where it might not be able to come back and find any tiny shafts of light.

The investigation into Maria Riedle’s murder will also be a throughline for the season, which may also help, in its strange way, pull this show away from the abyss. Will Elvira fall for Emerson and abandon her killing spree? Who knows? As we see, Emerson’s investigation will hit very close to home for Elvira, so there’s going to be a lot of mixed feelings there.

Still, there’s only so much darkness we can handle, and we wonder just how dark things are going to get on this show.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: As Elvira walks down the street, she envisions everyone she sees with their obituaries hovering over their heads. She quotes Hughie in voice over when she says, “These things won’t write themselves.”

Sleeper Star: We liked Danielle Galligan as Mallory because her character is such a polar opposite of Elvira, yet the two are best friends because they have their mothers’ untimely deaths in common.

Most Pilot-y Line: We really dislike the heavy use of voice over to convey the main character’s inner thoughts, and the device is used far too much in this first episode.

Our Call: Obituary is entertaining for a show that’s so dark. But you absolutely need to be in the right mood to sit down and watch it. If you have any positivity coursing through you before you watch, the first hour may just squelch that for a few days.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.