Six Feet Under

Alan Ball is interested in the lies families tell themselves to keep functioning. The polite fiction of the perfect dad. The polite fiction that the closeted son is just a private man. The polite fiction that the daughter will be fine, she is just a phase. The show's method is to pull those polite fictions apart slowly, over years, and let the characters re-meet each other as the people they actually are.

Queer identity runs through David's arc with a rare honesty for 2001 network-adjacent television. He starts the pilot deep in the closet, halfway-out to himself, terrified of Ruth's reaction. What the show does with him over five seasons changed what prestige cable was allowed to do with gay leads. True Blood, Ball's next HBO show, inherits the interest. Six Feet Under gets there first and gets there quieter.

Everything. Everyone. Everywhere. Ends.

That's the show's tagline and also its working theory. Every cold open is another iteration of it. An ironic pop-star death, then a grandfather off a ladder. A toddler in one episode, a complete stranger in another. The Fishers look at each body and get on with the work, because the work is the only answer the show offers to a question it refuses to solve.

🎨 Style & Atmosphere

Visually it is LA sunlight and formaldehyde. Lemon-yellow California light pours through the Fisher house windows. The dream sequences go overexposed and strange. The prep room glows in fluorescent green-white. Alan Ball lets director-episodes breathe. Rodrigo García, Alan Poul, Kathy Bates, Jeremy Podeswa and Nicole Holofcener all take swings behind the camera, and the result is an hour of television that can look quite different from one week to the next without losing itself.

The tone is harder to pin down. Domestic drama with the heat turned up past comfort, shot through with black comedy that can be properly funny one minute, and with surreal interludes where the dead speak and the living cannot stop listening. The show can leave you winded without telegraphing it, and the musical-cue work was genre-defining for HBO at the time.

It is shot like a film, with an ensemble that plays every scene like theatre and a score that borrows from European art cinema. Nothing else from its era moves or looks quite the same way.

📈 Reception & Legacy

The numbers. Nine Emmy wins across 44 nominations, three Golden Globes, a Peabody in 2002 for general excellence, Outstanding Drama Series at the 2002 Emmys. Critics ranked it with The Sopranos and The Wire during its run, and the ranking has only gone up in the two decades since.

The series finale, "Everyone's Waiting", is widely held to be the greatest ending any American drama has given us. I will say nothing more about it than that, because if you have not seen it I want you to go in as blind as the first-time viewers did in August 2005. The finale is the reason Six Feet Under keeps showing up on "best ever" lists even when shows from its era that had louder weekly water-cooler buzz do not.

Its influence on what came after is quiet and everywhere. You can see it in the family-unit prestige drama of Mad Men, and in the moral-cost framing of Breaking Bad that followed. The LA-melancholy register later picked up by Mare of Easttown also traces back here. Every HBO drama about a dysfunctional family since 2005 is working in a room that Six Feet Under built.

🏆 Why It Works

The best answer is the simplest one. The Fishers feel like real people, because Alan Ball gave them five full seasons to make and remake themselves, and because the actors playing them were, without exception, operating at the top of their range.

I came to it late. I expected a clever HBO drama about a funeral parlour. I got one of the most emotionally serious pieces of television I have ever sat with. Go in knowing it will take you places not every series is prepared to go, and knowing the payoff for sitting through it is unlike anything else on the medium.

If you liked the family-rot slow burn of Succession or the queer-identity and Catholic-guilt register of Boardwalk Empire, you have the muscles to watch this. If you have never sat through a show that made you phone your mother afterwards, Six Feet Under is a good place to start.

Richard Jenkins

Nathaniel Fisher Sr.