Series Review: "The Last Word" ("Das letzte Wort") (2020).

From the writer of Was man von hier aus sehen kann comes Das letzte Wort (The Last Word). This German series created by Carlos V. Irmscher and Aron Lehmann. In their twenty-five years of marriage they've shared wonderful moments and good times, had children, fought, and made up. But when her husband Stephan dies unexpectedly, Karla is quickly confronted with secrets they had never discussed. Her shock, pressing financial worries and her doubts over her husband's loyalty push Karla to rush into applying to work with funeral director Borowski as an eulogist. She's unapologetic, loud, and unconventional. Karla ignores her own life until she's surrounded by total chaos and has to ask herself: is there a right way to grieve? And if there is, what's her right way?

The series stars Anke Engelke, Thorsten Merten, Johannes Zeiler, Nina Gummich, Juri Winkler, Gudrun Ritter, Claudia Geisler-Bading, Aaron Hilmer, and Dela Dabulamanzi. Engelke at her best. You'll laugh, you'll cry and you'll make strange noises doing both at the same time while watching this dark comedy. Engelke is doing next-level stuff, brilliantly balancing black comedy with melancholy for a uniquely life-affirming experience. As it is the case in Engelke's performance, kindness ultimately prevails in this story of an embittered man in a world that has taken so much from him.

The show has its funny moments but it is more drama than comedy, taking seriously its exploration of loss, depression and the resilience of optimism. If you've not seen it, consider it a must-see, even for those who are not fans of these kinds of shows. The show is something else again, straddling all of that beautiful discomfort with something profoundly more complex, an exploration of the pivot between life and death. But the show made me laugh at least four times an episode, and I felt that here was a genuine, rather brave and quite decent attempt to portray true, hopeless grief on screen. While the destination may be incredibly predictable, the journey is more than worth the ride thanks to a script that is in equal parts both funny and surprisingly humane. The show, unspooling in six eminently bingeable near hour long episodes, is bitter and sweet, sad and funny, cruel and tender, cynical and sentimental, heartless and heartwarming, all at the same time and sometimes even in the same scene. The show, for all its casually entertaining cruelties, is a show about moving on and keeping faith with our essential humanity. From the bleak hell of grief, Irmscher and Lehmann have created something redemptive and beautiful. The show is infuriatingly difficult to define. It is by turns outrageous, uplifting, unflinching, sad, hilarious and angry. Mostly, it's an exercise in melancholy, and I adored it. Once in a while, all the pieces come together. The bad news is the show is short (six episodes), so the parts that don't work carry a lot of weight. The show has given us an affecting series, populated with a collection of fine characters, ably played. It doesn't always hit home, but when it does it is something special.

Simon says The Last Word (Das letzte Wort) receives: