There were two and only two seasons of "First Person," Erroll Morris' documentary series, and both are included on this three-DVD set. They make for frequently morbid but undeniably absorbing television.
Morris has an unusual style. Using his "Interrotron," a camera with a mirror that allows subjects to look at the director and answer his questions naturally even as they face viewers squarely, he interviews quirky, articulate people, most of whom seem to have an intimate relationship with death. Interspersed among snippets of the interviews are documents, reenactments, and archival footage.
How death-obsessed is Morris? Well, his most famous feature documentaries have included "Gates of Heaven," about pet cemeteries; "The Thin Blue Line," about a police murder; and "The Fog of War," about Robert McNamara, architect of the Vietnam War, for which Morris won an Academy Award. This series is just as fixated on the Grim Reaper. It includes just over eight hours worth of episodes: 15 that originally ran half an hour and two that lasted an hour. There ain't no more!
* "Mr. Debt," a lawyer who sues credit card companies
* "Eyeball to Eyeball," a zoologist who searches for giant squid and tells us what it would be like to be eaten by one
* "Stairway to Heaven," the autistic animal researcher Temple Grandin, who designs slaughterhouses
* "The Killer Inside Me," a woman who tends to fall in love with serial killers
* "I Dismember Mama," the owner of a cryogenic center who froze his mother's head after she died
* "The Stalker," a postal worker who was shot in a spree killing and still fears for his life
* "The Parrot," a bird who witnessed a mysterious murder
* "Smiling in a Jar," the director of a museum of skeletons and medical freaks preserved in formaldehyde
* "In the Kingdom of the Unabomber," a psychologist who became killer Ted Kaczynski's pen-pal
* "The Little Gray Man," a man who was an undercover CIA agent during the Cold War
* "You're Soaking in It," a woman who cleans up scenes of murder and suicide
* "Mr. Personality," a forensic psychiatrist and expert on the personalities of depraved killers
* "The Only Truth," a lawyer who helps murderers and mobsters get away with it
* "Harvesting Me," an entrepreneur who broadcasts his life on the Internet
* "One in a Million Trillion," a perennial high school student, nude model, and game show contestant (one hour)
* "Leaving the Earth," the airline pilot who helped save 185 lives in a crash that killed 111 (one hour)
* "The Smartest Man in the World," a bar bouncer and self-proclaimed genius
By my count, that's at least 12 out of 17 shows that have a connection to death. Tell me this man is not at least as obsessed as the obsessive people he interviews. If you like true confessions and the truly odd, you'll find plenty to enjoy in this set. In the words of the Don Henley song, "It's interesting when people die / Give us dirty laundry!"
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