Frontline

I like a lot of TV shows.  Too many, really.  But my current favorite has to be Frontline.  Last night, I watched, “The Undertaking,” an unnarrated hour with the Lynch Funeral Home in Michigan.  The stories were intense and sweet of the people who came to bury their loved ones — young and old — and those who came to plan their own funerals. And the readings by funeral director Thomas Lynch really tie the whole hour together.

I spent a fair amount of time around undertakers growing up.  My dad ran a concrete company, the major product of which was burial vaults, the indestructible in-ground box into which a coffin is placed. Every year he’d take us to the convention of the Minnesota Funeral Directors Association.  We’d get pens with our name embossed on it, key chains with casket company logos, and samplers of the little orange flag with a black cross that you magnetize to your car when in a funeral procession.  And those funeral directors told some dirty jokes.

It seems impossible the Frontline can so compellingly produce shows about domestic politics and the Iraq War and a show as personal and sensitive as “The Undertaking,” but somehow it does.