This post contains spoilers for last night’s “Fargo,” as well as many notable TV dramas of the last 10-15 years.
As I watched Jesse Plemons’ Ed use his butcher shop equipment to chop up, then grind up, the body of local gangster Rye Gerhardt, I realized I had unwittingly become a connoisseur in the art of TV corpse disposal. Not only could I identify a previous show that used a similar method – on “The Sopranos,” Christopher and Furio went to Satriale’s to chop up Richie Aprile’s corpse, though they didn’t go so far as to then run him through the meat grinder – but I could compare it to the way previous Plemons-killed characters were done away with. (Ed’s method was better than Landry dumping a body in a river, but perhaps less effective than what Walt, Jesse, and Mike had to do to poor Drew Sharp after Todd shot him.) And it also means that I’m much harder on TV characters who don’t seem to know what to do with dead bodies. (I’m looking at you, “How to Get Away with Murder” law students.)
People get murdered in very creative ways on TV, and often disposed of in even more creative ways. (On “Bones” alone, they’ve found victims’ remains buried in the strangest of places every week for 10-plus seasons.)
So as I brace myself to never eat ground beef again, I thought I’d look back at some other memorably gruesome but effective TV practices for making sure a dead body not only stays dead, but doesn’t get found or identified. These are some of my favorites (and I realize what that phrase says about me); what are yours?