This Week in Death

This week in Death could possibly be my favorite project of all time. At the dawning of the podcast era, I was dipping in to video podcasting with a novel idea… to take the obituary of someone and make a short mockumentary about it. I LOVED working on these.

The only problem with this was that it was SUPER time consuming. The research took forever. The writing took forever. The editing took forever. It was so fast and so easy to burn out while doing them. I wanted it to be a WEEKLY podcast. I couldn’t keep up with it. The turnaround time was closer to a few weeks. It took a while to find someone worth doing. Yet, there were always interesting people dying. I backlogged them. Then, they just fell away. I couldn’t keep up at all.

If I had the time or a staff of people to continue this, I would totally executive produce these forever. They are funny and irreverent and downright rude. Yet, at the same time, they are a tribute. For instance, The Yvonne DeCarlo episode, I was contacted by the family and they corrected a few things, but were honored that I was so complete in my portrayal of her.

As for Steve Rogers, when I learned that Marvel was going to kill of Captain America, I contacted their press department and got permission to make my This Week in Death.

William Lee Brent