For five years Six Feet Under entranced, entertained and moved audiences all over the world with its black humor, sharp characterization and flawless cast. It is now justly remembered as one of the best programs in television history, and can undoubtedly be considered HBO's masterpiece, hand in hand with The Sopranos - that's how groundbreaking its five seasons and 63 episodes were and still are.
The show was created by Alan Ball, the Oscar-winning writer of American Beauty, and it is easy to see how SFU is Beauty's small-screen companion piece: they're both poignant, funny, original studies of traditional American values and families gone wrong, two pitch-perfect satires that hit the target with unprecedented accuracy, unafraid to use foul language, sex, drugs and - a truly brilliant choice, this - dream sequences to achieve their goal.
What the Burnhams did on the big screen, the Fishers do on the small: they appear to be normal, but are really too dysfunctional to even accept themselves. Of course, "normality" is a bit of an odd concept when your house is a funeral parlor and you spend day after day comforting strangers while wearing a mask of thinly veiled hypocrisy.
From that situation Ball got the premise of the show: what if one day you had to bury a family member? When Nathan Samuel Fisher Sr. (Richard Jenkins), owner of Fisher & Sons, is run over by a bus in the first scene of the series, the rest of the family slowly falls apart: the adulterous widow Ruth (Frances Conroy) is overcome by guilt; the eldest son, Nate Jr. (Peter Krause) is forced to reluctantly join the business; his brother David (Michael C. Hall) is completely dedicated to the family trade, but also gay and a bit awkward when he has to express his feelings; and the youngest sibling (Claire) has a thing for experimenting with drugs and dating the wrong boys. Helping them, or possibly not, in their attempts to cope with the new situation, are Federico Diaz (Freddy Rodriguez), who embalms the corpses over at Fisher & Sons, Keith Charles (Mathew St. Patrick), an African-American police officer who is dating David, and Brenda Chenowith (Rachel Griffiths), Nate's girlfriend, who has to deal with a twisted brother of her own, the mentally disturbed Billy (Jeremy Sisto).
Six Feet Under was an essential tool in dealing with one of the biggest taboos in television: death. Every Single episode begins with someone biting the dust, often in a darkly comic way (the porn-star who gets electrocuted by her cat in the fifth episode comes to mind). Subsequently, the Fishers have to arrange the burial, and in most cases the departed come back in ghostly form to offer advice (the most notable case is that of Nathaniel Fisher himself, who pops up regularly in all five seasons). Many people were shocked by the almost grotesque tone of the series (the pilot episode even had fake commercials for funeral products), but what they failed to understand is that Six Feet Under deals with death as a means to celebrate life. To fully embrace existence implies that at some point one must also discuss the end of it all, and like Alfred Hitchcock used to say in his own TV series, what better way to face death than with a smile on your face? In its own, twisted way, this show confirmed that once again laughter is the best medicine.
That doesn't mean the series should be mistaken for a full-on comedy, though: like stablemate The Sopranos, Six Feet Under remains, at its core, a pure American tragedy, the black humor being there just as a partial relief from the bleaker events occurring throughout the show's five-year run. The drama is perfectly served not just by the outstanding writing, but also, fundamentally, by the actors: Krause and Hall received most of the early praise, the former for acting as the audience's guide into the Fishers' twisted world, the latter for playing a believable, three-dimensional gay person, as opposed to the deliberately excessive and flamboyant characters depicted in another HBO hit, Sex and the City. The truth is, everyone gives their best, both the show's regulars (Rodriguez and Griffiths in particular) and the magisterial guest stars, including Patricia Clarkson, Lili Taylor, James Cromwell and Kathy Bates (who also directed a few episodes, like Steve Buscemi in The Sopranos).
With its unique perspective on life and death, which was controversially amusing and surprisingly serious at the same time, Six Feet Under stands out as one of the edgiest, most brilliant and thought-provoking products American TV has ever spawned, a series whose reflection on the American way of life has few rivals in any artistic category.
The show was created by Alan Ball, the Oscar-winning writer of American Beauty, and it is easy to see how SFU is Beauty's small-screen companion piece: they're both poignant, funny, original studies of traditional American values and families gone wrong, two pitch-perfect satires that hit the target with unprecedented accuracy, unafraid to use foul language, sex, drugs and - a truly brilliant choice, this - dream sequences to achieve their goal.
What the Burnhams did on the big screen, the Fishers do on the small: they appear to be normal, but are really too dysfunctional to even accept themselves. Of course, "normality" is a bit of an odd concept when your house is a funeral parlor and you spend day after day comforting strangers while wearing a mask of thinly veiled hypocrisy.
From that situation Ball got the premise of the show: what if one day you had to bury a family member? When Nathan Samuel Fisher Sr. (Richard Jenkins), owner of Fisher & Sons, is run over by a bus in the first scene of the series, the rest of the family slowly falls apart: the adulterous widow Ruth (Frances Conroy) is overcome by guilt; the eldest son, Nate Jr. (Peter Krause) is forced to reluctantly join the business; his brother David (Michael C. Hall) is completely dedicated to the family trade, but also gay and a bit awkward when he has to express his feelings; and the youngest sibling (Claire) has a thing for experimenting with drugs and dating the wrong boys. Helping them, or possibly not, in their attempts to cope with the new situation, are Federico Diaz (Freddy Rodriguez), who embalms the corpses over at Fisher & Sons, Keith Charles (Mathew St. Patrick), an African-American police officer who is dating David, and Brenda Chenowith (Rachel Griffiths), Nate's girlfriend, who has to deal with a twisted brother of her own, the mentally disturbed Billy (Jeremy Sisto).
Six Feet Under was an essential tool in dealing with one of the biggest taboos in television: death. Every Single episode begins with someone biting the dust, often in a darkly comic way (the porn-star who gets electrocuted by her cat in the fifth episode comes to mind). Subsequently, the Fishers have to arrange the burial, and in most cases the departed come back in ghostly form to offer advice (the most notable case is that of Nathaniel Fisher himself, who pops up regularly in all five seasons). Many people were shocked by the almost grotesque tone of the series (the pilot episode even had fake commercials for funeral products), but what they failed to understand is that Six Feet Under deals with death as a means to celebrate life. To fully embrace existence implies that at some point one must also discuss the end of it all, and like Alfred Hitchcock used to say in his own TV series, what better way to face death than with a smile on your face? In its own, twisted way, this show confirmed that once again laughter is the best medicine.
That doesn't mean the series should be mistaken for a full-on comedy, though: like stablemate The Sopranos, Six Feet Under remains, at its core, a pure American tragedy, the black humor being there just as a partial relief from the bleaker events occurring throughout the show's five-year run. The drama is perfectly served not just by the outstanding writing, but also, fundamentally, by the actors: Krause and Hall received most of the early praise, the former for acting as the audience's guide into the Fishers' twisted world, the latter for playing a believable, three-dimensional gay person, as opposed to the deliberately excessive and flamboyant characters depicted in another HBO hit, Sex and the City. The truth is, everyone gives their best, both the show's regulars (Rodriguez and Griffiths in particular) and the magisterial guest stars, including Patricia Clarkson, Lili Taylor, James Cromwell and Kathy Bates (who also directed a few episodes, like Steve Buscemi in The Sopranos).
With its unique perspective on life and death, which was controversially amusing and surprisingly serious at the same time, Six Feet Under stands out as one of the edgiest, most brilliant and thought-provoking products American TV has ever spawned, a series whose reflection on the American way of life has few rivals in any artistic category.