Sex, Loneliness, and Tears: How ‘Vida’ Became The Realest Show About Grief

Vida is a show that starts with someone’s end. When Vidalia Hernandez dies, her two grown daughters, Emma (Mishel Prada) and Lyn (Melissa Barrera), return to their Eastside Los Angeles home to say goodbye. The problem is neither sister is all too adept at managing grief. Lyn hooks up with her ex-boyfriend at her mother’s funeral and proceeds to sabotage his relationship with his pregnant fiancée and Emma suppresses her pain out of spite since she was rejected by her mother for being queer even though Vidalia died secretly married to a woman, Eddy.

As its name suggests, Vida is a show brimming with life, but it also nails the messy ways real people deal with death. It’s not something processed in the span of a week, or in clear cut steps. Grief erupts in the middle of a normal afternoon, compels you to indulge in odd vices, or pushes you to clamp down on every kind of emotional expression. Vida’s first season portrays all these reactions in their ugly-beautiful glory.

Vida creator and showrunner Tanya Saracho told Decider during Summer 2018 TCA that, as always, “our north star was just truth.” She said, “Unfortunately we have some writers who have had that experience. Not just parents, but other family members as well. How it manifests is very different.”

“I guess you never know [how you’ll react] until it happens. You’re not going to react by the book. So the weird things, like: ‘Yeah, I’m going to have sex at my mother’s funeral because I’m not dealing…I think I’m dealing. I’m not dealing. These tears are not dealing.'” Saracho said, “Those conversations were very important because grief looks like a lot of things.”

Star Mishel Prada said that she had a secret weapon in understanding how different grief looks in different people. Prada said, “I had just finished working on a play called Rabbit Hole, and it was really just serendipitous and strange because in that play, all four of the main characters are grieving so differently. On stage, you look at them, and they’re so lonely even though they’re together all the time. So that was the space I had going into this. It’s exactly that thing where you’re seeing each person grieving so differently and yet they are lonely. Kind of looking at each other, ‘Why aren’t you grieving like me?’ or ‘I need you this way.’”

“With Emma, she just wasn’t dealing with it. It was dealing with her. In a way, it was something she held onto for so long — her grief with her mother — because essentially she grieved the death of her mother as a mother figure when she was younger,” Prada said. “In her mind, she shows up and thinks, ‘Well, I don’t have a mother as far as I’m concerned. So I’ve already grieved that.’ Being there, alone, starts ripping that off and she’s doing everything she can to hold onto that shield.”

Melissa Barrera hadn’t come off of a play about grief, but she was able to draw upon her own personal experiences grappling with the force. “I know that for me, I could identify with the way Lyn grieved completely,” Barrera said. “Because what I do in life is if I lose someone, I will cry for a little bit, and then act like nothing happened. You just like try literally to turn the page, and [get back to] normal life. But there’s always something that’s weighing on you, and then when you least expect it, it just triggers you. And for Lyn, it’s sex. So I could connect with her.”

Where to Stream Vida