"In When Death Goes Pop, Charlton D. Mellwain describes a striking emerging shift in the way that death is represented in such omnipresent forms of media as television - a shift that seems to be moving the American discourse on death and dying from the private sphere to the public. The book surveys the past thirty years of death-related television programming, from daytime soaps to prime-time drama, focusing primarily on Home Box Office's Six Feet Under and its innovative approach to the subject, and from the Sci-Fi Channel's Crossing Over to the genre of paranormal programming as a whole. This book also discusses the increasing use of multimedia and the Internet in the funeral industry and how the new technologies change the way that we remember the dead as they create and sustain what we might call a "virtual community of death.""--Jacket.