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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
In the new series "Six Feet Under," the grim reaper could use a little more sting.
Jun 26, 2001 | Death -- it's a riot. Isn't it? On HBO's new comedy series, "Six Feet Under," creator Alan Ball, who wrote "America Beauty" and won an Oscar for his trouble, uses a funeral home and the American way of death to look at family and relationship mores in the early 21st century. But four episodes in, exactly what Ball is trying to do remains opaque.
The show is fun, black and intermittently engrossing. But it's difficult not to feel, as we watch, that we're being asked to participate in an experiment that hasn't quite jelled. The resulting failure is an interesting test of HBO's prime marketing challenge, which is to create must-see TV on a pay-TV channel. There are jackpots available, as proved by the success of "The Sopranos," which has become a cultural touchstone and a huge new audience draw for the network. But "Six Feet Under" lacks the obvious sex appeal of "Sex and the City" or the niche audience of something like "Arliss," the Robert Wuhl show about a sports agent. These shows indicate that the two things needed to build a pay-TV audience are quality and audaciousness. But "Six Feet Under" lacks both.
The show runs for an hour each Sunday, originally in the "Sopranos" time slot. (For the first few weeks, the network tied it to "Sex and the City" and "Arliss," but that plan was a bust; on most cable services, "Sex and the City" now shows at 9 p.m. with "Six Feet Under" airing immediately after it at 9:30 p.m. If you want to catch up, the network is showing the first four episodes in order this Sunday.) The premiere is set on Christmas Eve day. We see Nathaniel Fisher, owner of the Fisher and Sons Funeral Home, cruise down the street in his corporate hearse and then get sent to his maker when an oncoming bus crushes the car. (The father, who haunts his family members in the first few episodes, is played with sarcastic aplomb by character actor Richard Jenkins.)
The death does what it's supposed to do -- set the insecurities and emotional dysfunctionalities of the remaining family into sharp relief. It turns out that his frowning, dowdy wife, Ruth (Frances Conroy), has been having an affair. One of his three kids, David (Michael C. Hall), is the good son, all prim and proper and ready to comfort his bereaved customers as he sells them an elaborate funeral.
Nate Jr. (Peter Krause), the eldest son, left the family years ago, and has been spending the interim working at a food co-op in Seattle and sleeping around. Coming home on Christmas Eve, he has an airport storeroom quickie with Brenda (Rachel Griffiths, an Oscar nominee for her role as Hilary du Pré in "Hilary and Jackie"), whom he's met on the airplane. He gets a cellphone call with the bad news about his dad while he's rearranging his clothes.
The final kid is Claire, played by the cherubic, acid Lauren Ambrose. She seems to spend her time getting into low-level trouble at school and being slightly freaked out by her home surroundings.
Each episode begins with a gruesome death: an overextended con man cracks his head open in a swimming pool; a baker gets pureed in a massive blender accident; a Latino gang member is offed when he gets caught on the wrong block. The resulting bit of business for Fisher and Sons is the setting against which other, longer story lines play out. David, it turns out, is gay. He's got a boyfriend who's a cop and out of the closet, too, though David isn't quite. With news of the father's death, a representative for a funeral-home conglomerate wants to buy the family out; when, after some discussion, they turn him down, he gets belligerent and promises to put them out of business. Nate Jr. decides he wants to rejoin the family, to David's irritation; he consistently fumbles the jobs he takes on behalf of the mortuary, all the while pursuing an extravagant sex life with Brenda.
