Occasionally they risked being too sweet, such was the show's apparent commitment to awkward encounters, grim mishap, gloriously foul language, naked insecurity and the supreme unlikelihood of life turning out OK.
Yesterday investigators were still trying to reconcile the mother's claims with the grim scene they encountered early Wednesday in a sixth-floor apartment at the Patterson Houses in the Melrose section of the Bronx: a 17-pound dead girl, clothed only in a diaper and with roach bites across her body.
The lesson is embedded in a series of grim stories about fatal encounters with the forces of nature.
"Child marriage, teen pregnancy, maternal mortality and limited access to education and family planning, are some of the grim issues that millions encounter.
We provide the answers today when we encounter these grim details, tomorrow when we take civic action, and next year when we flock to the polls, and I am hopeful that the next measurement of our civic health is the first indicator of a welcome and long-awaited renewal.
Despite the endless disappointments that Dolores encounters, with her grim sense of humor, she emerges as an unconventional heroine who is both broken and unbreakable.
This suggests that women's encounter with the grim reaper is postponed because they can perform for their grandchildren services similar to those they performed for their children.
Shipwrecked on a South Sea island, they have to dodge sharks and pirates, but most scarily encounter cannibals, whose grim feasting they witness in horror.
All is shot phantasmagorically out of sequence as Brandon provokes a jealous barroom bruiser into beating him up, has an encounter in a grim place of gay assignations, and takes part in an orgy.
And it might be even more surprising to encounter some of the grim underpinnings of these delicious fireside tales.
