Steeply's father and M*A*S*H — "He died in his easy chair…"
He died in his easy chair, set at full Recline, watching an episode in which Alda’s Hawkeye can’t stop sleepwalking and fears he’s going out of his fucking mind until a professional military therapist reassures him, I remember.
Context
The father dies as he lived his last years: reclined, viewing, mid-episode, in a chair "all but unrecognizable," having refused near the end even to leave the den to use the bathroom. The scene the father dies watching is itself about a man afraid he's losing his mind and being told he isn't — a cruelty the son remembers with pin-sharp precision decades on. This is the theme's deepest rhyme: a father literally consumed to death by an entertainment, recalled by the son now tasked with stopping a cartridge that kills its viewers exactly this way. The old man in the full-Recline chair is the Entertainment's first victim, discovered one generation early, in a den in Troy.