My latest streaming success – finding a quality show that I haven’t read or heard about – is the German series The Last Word. It’s a comedy about death, in the way the Italian series, The Vertical Line, is a comedy about cancer. In the first episode, a couple is hosting an anniversary party, at the end of which the husband drops dead. He was a beloved husband and father, we learn, and a delinquent dentist, spending the last two years of his life going to his studio to paint instead of to his office. This is news to his widow, who, now bereft of savings, must downsize the lavish funeral she had planned. She must also find a job. At the funeral she discovers a talent for public speaking, and gets herself hired by the funeral director as the home’s official eulogist.
There is humor in all of this, played very deftly by all of the actors, and intelligence. The subtitles are in English except on the rare occasions when the characters speak English. This happens in one of the early episodes, when Karla, the eulogist, tries to console a distraught young man who has just lost his wife. She mentions James Joyce as an example of a husband who also felt an intimate attachment to his wife. “I can smell her farts,” she quotes the great writer, “in a room full of farts.”
I suspect you don’t get literary references like that on Schitt’s Creek. (Though, considering the show's name, you should.) And if you do, they’re not in a foreign language.
