Six Feet Under first came out as a series in 2001 and ran through 2005. I was home on sabbatical during part of that time and used to gather with half a dozen friends once a week to watch it together. We recognized its power then, and I have to say that power has not diminished in the two decades since.
If you are not familiar with it, it is the story of three families, the Fishers, the Chenowiths and the Diazes. It takes place in a funeral home in Los Angeles and begins with the death of Nathaniel Fisher Sr., whose car is hit by a bus on Christmas Eve on his way to the airport to pick up Nate, Jr., a kind of prodigal son who ran away to live in Seattle to escape getting drawn into the family funeral home business. At home is Nate's younger brother, David, a "good little son" and closeted gay man; their sister, Claire, still in her late teens who feels very much like the "also ran" child of the family; and their mother, Ruth, who has perfected the art of turning herself into a doormat while at the same time never surrendering the right to lay expectations on everyone else in sight.
While waiting for his father, Nate meets and has sex in a public restroom with Brenda Chenowith, who has a psychologically incestuous connection to her bipolar brother Billy. Billy frequently causes real havoc when he stops taking his meds so that he can "feel again" from time to time. They are the children of two sexually-disturbed psychiatrists who have imprinted their kinks and hangups onto the souls of their children and seem not to know what they've done or care.
The third family consists of Federico "Rico" Diaz, a restorative artist who works at the Fisher Funeral Home, his wife and two boys. They seem to have been included primarily to contrast how a supposedly "normal" family falls apart. Just in case you missed the point that this show is about dysfunctionality.
This second-time around, Six Feet Under, no surprise, had a wholly different impact on me. The first time I zeroed in on the gay characters and the comic effect of the dysfunctionality of the Fisher and Chenowith families. This time, as an old man whose friends and acquaintances are dying faster than I can keep up with them, and whose own death, now that I've been diagnosed with a terminal disease, is, if not imminent, at least in sight, I naturally saw the 63-episode series as being more than anything else about how one contends with death.
It wasn't long before I began to feel the same impatience I feel with virtually all series-length productions. Eventually the time comes when you get annoyed with the failure of the characters to learn from their mistakes. Here, as in most soap operas, character flaws are all over the place: Nate is clueless, Billy is pathologically self-involved, Ruth is a textbook case of passive aggressivity, etc. It's hard to like these people; you find yourself wanting to slap some sense into them. But a moment's reflection makes clear that this response is evidence how good the writing is, and when I reached the 63rd and final episode, which is all about how the characters die in the future, an episode which has justifiably been called the finest ending ever written in a television series, I found myself mourning their passing, and sitting quietly for the longest time wishing I could bring them all back to life.
There are scenes along the way that are over-the-line heavy. The one about sudden infant death syndrome - crib death - was one. But the one that wouldn't let go is the one in which David is car-jacked by a crazed psychopath pretending to have car trouble. David stops and offers to help when the guy pulls a gun on him and makes him dump the body David is transporting, then makes him get out of the van, pours gasoline on him and sticks a pistol in his mouth before laughing and driving off with the van, leaving his gasoline-soaked victim to find his way home. Keith too is living with a memory he can't shake of killing a man who points a gun at him in a struggle. David and Keith both struggle to overcome shame and guilt over not being able to seize control in a moment of life-and-death consequence. and can't get themselves to recognize and accept how powerless they were to change the way things came down.
A major player in the plot line is the evolution of gay rights. When the story begins, homophobia is still ever-present and Keith is frustrated with David for being so resistant to coming out. By the end of the series, five years later, David and Keith are married and adopting two abandoned boys. They have come through the struggle to form a mixed-race family - Keith is black, as are the boys, and David is white - with two daddies, and it's David who is, if anything, the more progressive and enlightened of the two. Alan Ball, the writer and producer of Six Feet Under is himself gay, and the story is a beautiful example of his activism. The warmth of the social realism - if that's what it is - contrasts with the starkness of all the death and dysfunctionality.
I don't know if I'd recommend the show to everyone. The language is coarse, the sex is kinky and often overwrought, and focusing on death is understandably not everyone's idea of a good time activity. But if you believe, as I do, that movies, whether made for the big screen or for television, are the art form of our day, you could do much worse than binge on Six Feet Under.
photo credit
left to right in photo: David Fisher, (played by Michael C. Hall, of Dexter fame); Ruth Fisher (Frances Conroy); Claire (Lauren Ambrose), Nate (Peter Krause), Brenda (Rachel Griffiths), Keith (Mathew St. Patrick), Federico Diaz (Freddy Rodriguez)
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