Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Saturdays, I will be reviewing The American Short Story, which ran semi-regularly on PBS in 1974 to 1981.  The entire show can be purchased on Prime and found on YouTube and Tubi.

This week, The American Short Story adapts a short story by Katherine Anne Porter.

Episode #16 “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall”

(Dir by Randa Haines, originally aired 1980)

Granny Weatherall (Geraldine Fitzgerald) is dying.  While the doctor tries to comfort her and the priest tries to provide salvation, Granny obsesses on cleaning her house and getting everything in its proper place.  She thinks about how her adult daughter, Cornelia (Lois Smith), is incapable of keeping the house as clean as Granny Weatherall believes it should be.  Memories of the past and hallucinations of the present flood her mind and she remembers the time that she was jilted by a suitor and she thinks about how she has to live long enough to destroy the letters that he once wrote her.  But the coldness of death is always hovering in the background….

This episode moved a bit slowly but it was effective due to the performance of Geraldine Fitzgerald and also Randa Haines’s direction, which kept the viewer unsure of whether they were seeing reality or if they were just seeing Granny Weatherall’s dying thoughts.  The short story itself is written as a stream-of-consciousness and Haines does her best to capture that feeling in her adaptation.  One of the main problems with The American Short Story has been that most of the adaptations have struggled to capture the tone of the original stories.  The Jilting of Granny Weatherall’s visuals come very close to recreating the power of Katherine Anne Porter’s words.

Next week, The American Short Story wraps up with an adaptation of a James Thurber short story.