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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
"Six Feet Under," Alan Ball's mordant, metaphysical and deeply humane soap opera, may just be the best show on TV.
Mar 9, 2002 | Noted tyrant Josef Stalin once supposedly said, "One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic." Death is one of those things we tend not to take personally until it's personal -- which is why Fluffy's untimely demise will render a family red-eyed and listless for weeks, but a grisly New York Times headline won't. It's not hard to see how familiarity would breed detachment. Most of us never have to lug the mortal remains of some late lamented down to the basement, drain him, pickle him, stick a plastic plug in him and give him one last makeover before saying adios. It's no wonder that, as dream jobs go, funeral director is not exactly up there with MTV VJ.
"Six Feet Under," Alan Ball's dark, mordant and often inspired series -- which returned to HBO for its second-season premiere last Sunday night -- concerns the lives of a family of dysfunctional, intermittently repressed Los Angeles undertakers who, as the series began, were as inured to death as anyone knee-deep in it would be. The Fishers -- Ruth (Frances Conroy), her 30-something sons Nate (Peter Krause) and David (Michael C. Hall) and her teenage daughter Claire (Lauren Ambrose) -- give fresh meaning to the term "funeral home" by sharing their rambling house with their dearly departed clients and the occasional ghost.
For those who missed the first season, it opens with Nathaniel Fisher (Richard Jenkins), the charismatic but caustic paterfamilias, driving his new hearse to the airport to pick up his son Nate. Taking his eyes off the road for a second to light a cigarette, he gets broadsided by a bus. (Stop! Death! You're killing us!) Nathaniel's sudden death and the return of touchy-feely prodigal Nate have a seismic effect on the family.
It should be noted, however, that Nate is more feely than touchy; after he makes a big show of digging his hands into the dirt at his father's funeral and criticizes David for "sanitizing" the grieving process, David shoots back, "You want to get your hands dirty? You sanctimonious prick. Talk to me when you've had to stuff formaldehyde-soaked cotton up your father's ass so he doesn't leak." But slowly, the Fishers begin to cotton to Nate's "let's eat organic produce and talk about our feelings" ways, and the family gradually begins to unclench.
Timid Ruth, with her look cribbed straight from Grant Wood's "American Gothic," confesses to her long-term affair with a soft-spoken hairdresser and then breaks it off to start a new one with a blustery Russian florist. She learns a new, sensuous approach to flower arranging by shifting her breathing from "up here" (her head) to "down there" (unspecified) and makes frequent, hilariously clumsy attempts to relate to her three children as adults, including repeatedly letting them in on the status of her sex life and inquiring into theirs.
David, who was recently dumped by his boyfriend, Keith (Michael St. Patrick, as a handsome black cop who has been self-esteemed to a high gloss), for being emotionally unavailable, comes out to his family and eventually allows himself to feel grief at his father's death. Following Nate's example, he begins to relax his all-business approach, slowly improving his casket-side manner. Nate, meanwhile, begins to adjust to his new all-death, all-the-time schedule.
He fantasizes about his own death, communes with grievers and sees his father's ghost everywhere. One day, as he stands on a busy sidewalk staring at the ghost of his dad across the street, people walk by in slow motion and glance up at him curiously. For a moment, it's as if he's come to a dead stop in the middle of a parade of souls. As Nate comes to grips with the idea of his own mortality, he commits, or tries to commit, to his elusive and evasive girlfriend, Brenda (Rachel Griffiths); gets his dreaded funeral director's license; and begins to repair his relationship with uptight David, the kind of guy who drinks milk and sits in a straight-backed chair while watching porn.
Despite its morticians'-eye view of the world, "Six Feet Under" is oddly exuberant and life-affirming. Each episode kicks off, you might say, with a bucket; we are introduced to the Fishers' newest charge moments before they draw their last breath. Alternately random, tragic, absurd, violent, inopportune, excruciating and anticlimactic, the opening death scenes alone are worth the price of admission. In one episode, a young actress dies of an overdose right after watching herself getting hacked to pieces in her new slasher movie. In another, a woman is hit in the temple with a golf ball while peacefully reading a book in her garden. People may not be as unique or unpredictable in life as they'd like to think, but their deaths really are like snowflakes.
As the show consistently reminds us, plans, hopes and dreams are life's McGuffins. Without death, there would be no suspense, and without suspense there would be no story. And despite the fun it has with undertakers and the mildly soapy plot lines, "Six Feet Under" is not really about dying at all, but about how we choose to live. Its big (and obvious, but easily forgotten) idea is that you can't start to live until you come to terms with your own eventual stoppage. Death, in other words, is the meaning of life.
