Surviving Death
Surviving Death | |
---|---|
Documentary | |
Directed by | Ricki Stern |
Country of origin | United States |
No. of seasons | 1 |
No. of episodes | 6 |
Production | |
Producers | Jonele Conceicao Ricki Stern Jesse Sweet Jessica Vale |
Original release | |
Network | Netflix |
Release | January 6, 2021 |
Surviving Death is a docu-series directed by
While some reviewers described the show as providing a balanced treatment of a difficult topic, others have been highly critical, noting that the show takes a non-critical view of the scientific value of anecdotal subjective personal reports. The show has also been criticized for presenting pseudoscientific parapsychology as science and has been accused of exploiting the plight of fearful and grieving vulnerable people.[5][6]
Episodes
No. | Title | Directed by | Original release date [7] |
---|---|---|---|
1 | "Near-Death Experiences" | Ricki Stern | January 6, 2021 |
2 | "Mediums Part 1" | Ricki Stern | January 6, 2021 |
3 | "Mediums Part 2" | Ricki Stern | January 6, 2021 |
4 | "Signs from the Dead" | Ricki Stern | January 6, 2021 |
5 | "Seeing Dead People" | Ricki Stern | January 6, 2021 |
6 | "Reincarnation" | Ricki Stern | January 6, 2021 |
Reception
In The Independent 'State of the Arts', column writer Micha Frazer-Carroll described the series as appealing to those who are coping with
Culture writer and film critic Radheyan Simonpillai wrote for The Guardian that the series "has no shortage of paranormal activity. Mediums call on the dead. Seances try to manifest them. People claim to be reincarnated actors, pilots or murder victims while others describe feeling a heavenly embrace during near-death experiences." He adds that the show also welcomes skepticism. Simonpillai mentions that the show "tries to find the tricky balance between that Sherlock skepticism and Doyle's openness to spiritualism" and that "you have to be willing to accept that a visit from a persistent cardinal or flickering lights can be signs from the dead." He quotes Kean: "Everybody has to decide for themselves whether something has that meaning for them or not ... with signs, it's not really objective." He adds that unlike Kean's book, the series focuses more on testimonials of people who believed to have witnessed the afterlife.[1]
Live Science contributor Stephanie Pappas argued that while religious faith is untestable, outside of what science does, the series attempts to portray it as something that could be proven or discredited scientifically and that "it confuses its own narrative by offering the same credulity to outright scams as it does to outstanding questions about the process of death". She adds that while patients may still sometimes have experiences when doctors don't expect them to because their heart stopped, it is not an indication that they are supernatural or don't originate from the brain; that brain-endogenous
Film critic and pop-culture writer Nick Schager wrote for The Daily Beast that Surviving Death's evidence "is of a pseudo-scientific, anecdotal, and/or outright fanciful sort." He criticized the show for ignoring natural explanations, cultural narratives and human tendencies for these experiences and interpretations, but suggesting instead that the afterlife is real. He added: "To the series, anyone who doesn't accept these spiritual concepts and experiences is a 'skeptic' driven by 'hubris and arrogance.' It assumes a perspective in which the veracity of its claims is the norm, and those who view them with suspicion are close-minded cynics." Shager notes that while the series projects a type of skeptical dialogue, it is staged and loaded by believers to suggest conclusions. He adds that while the show does highlight how people cling to such experiences and beliefs for comfort, the repeated suggestions are that of a universal conclusion that lost loved ones are well ("affirmation-by-numbers"). He describes the show's view of afterlife as simplistic, "one in which all ghosts communicate in the same indirect-clue fashion, and have the same unrevealing things to say ... that our paths are irreversibly set in stone, and thus that we have no free will, and that a higher power with a divine plan governs everything and everyone." He noted the use of flawed justifications to avoid evaluating the reliability of claims, like that of ectoplasm generation: that it's averse to light, so cannot be filmed. He concluded by criticizing the recipe used to conclude the series, disguising faith into psychologist statements presenting a false equivalence without resolving anything.[5]
A review in the Explica magazine described Surviving Death as "one of the biggest nonsense of this incipient movie season", "a regrettable attempt to legitimize magical thinking", presenting a collection of pseudoscientific parapsychology as science. It points out that no proper laboratory experiment ever demonstrated evidence of the paranormal, but that advances in
References
- ^ a b c Simonpillai, Radheyan (7 January 2021). "'Maybe death isn't the end': can a TV series prove the existence of an afterlife?". The Guardian. Retrieved 9 January 2021.
- ^ a b Frazer-Carroll, Micha (8 January 2021). "Surviving Death: How Netflix's new series speaks to my lockdown anxieties about dying". The Independent. Archived from the original on 25 May 2022. Retrieved 9 January 2021.
- ^ a b Pappas, Stephanie (17 January 2021). "Can science 'prove' there's an afterlife? Netflix documentary says yes". Live Science. Retrieved 25 January 2021.
The documentary emphasizes "proof" of life after death, but it mixes the debunked, the unknown and the unprovable.
- ^ "Leslie Kean". Penguin Random House. Retrieved 25 January 2021.
- ^ a b Schager, Nick (5 January 2021). "'Surviving Death': Netflix's New Series on the Afterlife Is Crackpot Nonsense". The Daily Beast. Retrieved 25 January 2021.
- ^ a b "Criticism of 'Surviving Death', the ridiculous and outrageous Netflix documentary series". Explica. 11 January 2021. Retrieved 26 January 2021.
- ^ "Surviving Death – Listings". The Futon Critic. Retrieved 16 January 2021.
External links
- Surviving Death on Netflix
- Surviving Death at IMDb