Why Is Six Feet Under Rarely Considered In The Same Breath as HBO's Other Masterpieces?

 

 

As someone who has read more than his share of books on the Golden Age of TV and HBO one of the things that strikes me are series that were considered masterpieces at the time but never seemed to be given the same reverence as so many of their contemporaries even now. The best example of this was in Alan Sepinwall's book on the era The Revolution Was Televised.

While Sepinwall does a masterful job dealing with all of the series that are among the greatest made during the first phase – from the debut of OZ in 1997 to Mad Men and Breaking Bad in 2007 – there are quite a few series that he for whatever reason chose to ignore discussing. I've mentioned a couple of them in my columns over the years but in hindsight the most glaring omission is Six Feet Under.

Now it's not like Six Feet Under was exactly underrated when it came out. It was nominated for Best Drama three of the four years it was eligible (for whatever reason the first two aired during the same year of eligibility 2001-2002) and it won both the Golden Globe and SAG Award for Best Drama during its run as well as numerous other awards. It's currently ranked 93^rd of the 250 greatest TV shows of all time, slightly ahead of Deadwood and basically tied with OZ.  And of course its series finale will no doubt rank as arguably the greatest one that any drama has ever had in the era of Peak TV, right up their with Breaking Bad.

Yet somehow whenever discussion of the dramas that started the revolution for HBO are discussed, one always talks about The Sopranos, The Wire and Deadwood as the three unquestioned masterpieces of that period. It's one thing not to give OZ its due but for a series that was nominated for Best Drama more times then the latter two shows combined? That earned 23 Emmy nominations its first year which at the time was more than any other HBO series had ever managed in a single season? (That record would stand until Game of Thrones came along.) That was, in many ways, far more inclusive and daring in those shows when it came to dealing with gay and lesbian representation (which in 2001 when it started was nearly unheard of even among cable TV)? A show that launched the careers of so many actors in its cast to a level of celebrity that 20 years after it ended has not even come close to dying down?

I may be overreacting but for me it is somewhat more personal. For whatever reason of all of the shows that were considered part of the revolution Six Feet Under was the first HBO drama I came in at the start and was there at the end. All the other HBO dramas (and indeed many of the comedies) that have followed I either came in the second season and then caught up or in the case of some ignored all together. (I have a much better track record with network dramas, Showtime and basically every other cable network.)

And I'll admit while I liked the show very much at the time, I found it odd compared to what I'd already seen and much of what was to come. But it wasn't until earlier this morning when I saw the Pilot for the first time in years that I began to get an idea as to why so many of my critics might well love Six Feet Under but not feel as comfortable calling it an all-time great as those done by the holy Trinity of Davids. For the purposes of this article I'm going to deal only with the Pilot but considering how accurately it set the tone of what was to come during the rest of the five seasons I think it applies overall.

 

 

Six Feet Under is by far the funniest of all of the HBO dramas and indeed almost all of the dramas that were to come during this decade.

Alan Ball sets the tone early by having Nathaniel Fisher, the paterfamilias of the Fisher Clan lighting his cigarette in the family hearse and being hit by a bus to the music of "I'll Be Home for Christmas". We then see Nate (Peter Krause) talking with his seatmate whose last name he doesn't know yet (Rachel Griffiths) about how little they're looking forward to the holidays and then hooking up in an airport closet. David (Michael C. Hall looks so youthful!) then gets the news and has to hold it together while doing another viewing. Claire (Lauren Ambrose) gets the news about her father's death while she's high on crystal meth.

When Nate gets to the morgue and goes in he sees the spectre of Nathaniel and the two have a perfectly civil conversation. Then Nate forgets to bring the body home because Claire is driving too fast. All of this is punctuated by commercial for mortuary products as if they were the kinds of ads for breakfast cereals.

Its worth remembering that Six Feet Under is by far the most personal and autobiographical of any series we got in the first decade of the 2000s. Ball did grow up in a funeral home, his father did die in a similar fashion, he was on drugs when he was notified and he was deeply closeted throughout his childhood. Yet at no point does Ball really take any part of this: the death, the funeral, every member of the Fisher family's reaction seriously. He acknowledges they're all dealing with a very real trauma but he makes it clear that they were dealing with their own shit. And the way all of these bizarre flashbacks involving Nathaniel in the mortuary with the Fisher children, and the way everybody casually is having conversations with the father even though he's gone is taken naturally and lightly. Which may be another reason this show is realized the same way:

 

The Fishers are by far the most normal characters we will ever see in the world of HBO dramas.

The Fishers are the average American family, married, 2.5 children (Claire is much younger then her siblings) working class Americans who just happen to have their house on top of a funeral parlor where they do their work. The secrets they keep (especially compared to The Sopranos which immediately preceded them) are fairly banal. David has been hiding he's gay from his family his whole life when it fact they've pretty much always known. Ruth has been having an affair with a hairdresser the last two years of the marriage. Claire is a rebellious teenager with no direction.

There will be some secrets that emerge in later secrets but none of them are the kinds of horrible destructive ones we will get used to in later shows. On the contrary what sets the Fishers apart from almost everyone else I've seen is that these crises are ways for them to come together as a family unit more often then they do internalize and fragment. Unlike what we saw from the actual Soprano family and what we got with the Drapers and the Whites, there are almost no crises that the Fishers don't find a way to deal with. They do so poorly and often badly but that's the same as every family really.

 

Death on Six Feet Under is treated less seriously and more everyday than on every other drama we've gotten since.

Six Feet Under famously starts every episode with at least one death. Some will be more tragic then others: there will be victims of shootings, crib deaths and deaths of loved ones after agonizing illnesses. But just as often the deaths are ludicrous: the laborer who's cut to pieces in a pretzel maker, the woman celebrated her divorce who sticks her head out a limo in joy and is flattened by a traffic light, a woman who is hit by a golf ball struck by someone we believe is an adversary. And that's just the first season.

We got used to recurring characters dying on a regular basis during the 21^st century and HBO would play the main role in making us used to that. But I almost wonder if Ball was being tongue in cheek with so many of the ridiculous and surprising deaths that took place over the years as comparison to his fellow showrunners. The three Davids all took the many character deaths on their shows with both utter seriousness and a fact of life to the point that in the later seasons the viewer was basically numb to it. The lives didn't matter to the characters on these shows and in many cases they didn't even get mourned.

Ball basically turns this idea on its head by arguing that death is a part of life. Fisher and Sons takes the loss of life far more seriously then those in the world of any of the other shows on HBO really did. Considering that the first season would premiere while The Sopranos was on hiatus, this is a stark contrast. To Tony Big Pussy's life didn't matter after he knew he was a rat and the fact that he left a family behind was irrelevant. To Nate and David Fisher, it's the only important thing mainly because it's how they earn their living.  The gangbanger who is killed gets the same treatment as the eight-year old who accidentally shoots himself when he finds his brothers gun. A loss of life matters to those left behind in a way it just doesn't to anyone else even if it’s a business expense.

 

There's no real antagonist or struggle on Six Feet Under the entire series.

This may be part of the reason the show isn't considered a masterpiece. Ball will make an effort in the first season to put up a threat to the Fisher family with Kroner, the corporation putting small homes like the Fishers out of business with a man named Galardi trying to buy them out in the Pilot and continuing for the rest of the season. Eventually he's fired and the corporate head spends much of Season 2 trying an indirect way to buy them out.

But even before Season 2 ends Kroner files for bankruptcy and while the funeral home facies financial difficulties they're never as serious as so many others. There's no existential threat facing the Fishers the way of the dying way of life in The Sopranos or The Wire or the encroaching rise of Hearst in Deadwood.

To be sure mortality is more prominent here as a threat to many of the characters but because Ball treats it as something that is everyday, it's basically invisible.

 

Six Feet Under isn't quite as serialized as the other shows of this era.

In a sense you could miss an episode or two of Six Feet Under during an average season and not really worry you'd miss something important. The serialized story that would be essential to the other HBO dramas and indeed most of what was to follow doesn't really apply here. There are guest arcs for certain new characters during the course of the season and there are some stories where it helps to know what happened immediately before. But it was never as intense as any of the other dramas during this period.

And because characters had a tendency to fall in and out of the Fisher clan with some regularity you didn't need to know the backstory the way you would with other shows. Sometimes they would have a longer memory. Once Nate would put some kind of drug in coffee and a few days later going camping Ruth would have a hallucinatory experience. Then when we'd forgotten about it, at the start of Season 2 Nate would have that same drug and go on a different trip.

 

Unlike any other cable show during this era Six Feet Under involves the characters improving with each season.

This may be the biggest difference between Six Feet Under and all the other HBO dramas to this point in their history. Almost every other drama from the era argued that change was hard and that the system was so broken that the individual would be ground down, whether it was the dysfunctional criminal justice system for OZ, everyone in Baltimore on The Wire and everyone in The Sopranos in some way.

Six Feet Under is far more optimistic about humanity then all of these other shows and indeed much of the ones that were to come. It believes in the power of the human spirit and the bonds we share in a less cynical way then any other drama and much of the comedy I watched during the first two decades of this century. It's not just in the funerals where they come together, but weddings, family dinners, parties, celebrations, really everything.

Perhaps its because it knows at the end of the day death waits for us all but everything before that incredible final ten minute sequence – and indeed much of what happens in it – is about the bonds the Fishers have made over the period. How their family has grown, how they have children and loved ones, how they are able to move on, how they bond in weddings and careers and with so many other people. And even in the deaths themselves there's a sense that they're finally being united with their loved ones.

And perhaps that may be the real reason Six Feet Under doesn't quite get the respect the way its other HBO dramas do even though it's just as good as them and in many ways more revolutionary. At the end of the day all of these shows have a very dark view of humanity bordering on the Hobbesian, that it is violent and solitary, that people are cruel and dumb, capable of being manipulated by an endless series of white male antiheroes.

Six Feet Under resists that definition. To be sure the Fisher family is white (though they spend a lot of time with members of their own Rainbow coalition over the years) but the sons are no better or worse then their mother or sister and they're certainly not antiheroes. They're all just trying to get through the day, hug their loved ones and try to deal with the banal ugliness of everyday life in America. They have a home and a community that they try to build and they have a sense of togetherness that it sorely lacking in so many of  even the best shows of this period. That was admirable then: these days its practically miraculous.

And maybe they have the best attitude towards so much of the conflict that all of their brethren were going through in HBO dramas and across TV. Like the old joke says: "Don't take life so seriously. You'll never get out of it alive." And the Fisher family knows all too well where you end up afterwards – with a mortician stuffing your ass with formaldehyde cloth so you don't leak.