Claire's getting into trouble, too -- she sleeps with a guy at school, who induces her to suck on his toes. He tells his friends and Claire's immediately branded a pervert. (In retaliation, she steals the foot of the poor chopped-up baker and leaves it in his locker.)

It's difficult to see where Ball is going with all of this. Although mordant and dark, the show never manages to become truly daring. Since to this family, death is a part of daily life, their attitudes toward the people they deal with are a bit detached, but never enough to be cruel. David pitches his coffins calmly, not greedily, and his salesmanship is always carefully contextualized as part of the operation's struggle for survival. While the show lets us know that the $9,000 coffins the family purveys carry a 100 percent markup, "Six Feet Under" doesn't pretend to be a muckraking, Jessica Mitford-like exposé. We're supposed to take the Fishers' business on its own terms.

The family members' relationship to their father's death turns out to be slightly detached as well. The father's specter materializes in the home for the first couple of episodes, but he now seems to have dropped out of sight for good. The family doesn't talk much about him, but the show isn't nuanced enough for viewers to understand whether it's part of the family's emotional clotting or if it just means he's gone for good.

The mother breaks off her affair, but it's not clear why. Where immediately after the father's death she was at pains to remove herself from the business, now she's back, for reasons never made clear.

In the "The Sopranos," creator David Chase's vision is organic -- virtually everything that happens can be seen through the twin prisms of the two families James Gandolfini oversees. "Six Feet Under" doesn't have that sort of focus. Nate Jr. seems to have a wild sex drive: He and Brenda couple in the storeroom, then in a vacant house across the street. Finally, and, most outrageously, his mother walks in while he's giving head to Brenda in the funeral-home sitting room! But there's no suggestion that he might have a problem. Brenda seems a little out of control as well. Somehow or somewhere, she ended up with a tattoo on her butt that says "Nathaniel": It's not clear whether she ran out to get it done the day after she nailed Nate in the airport or if it had been there before. (Maybe it was Nate Sr.!)

In contrast, the show tries to make a big deal out of David's remaining closeted before his family. But even this feels a little forced -- the guy's father just died, his mom's cracking up, his brother's moving into his turf and he's got a business to run. Give him a break!

And that's about it. You could write a book about the over- and undertones in "The Sopranos" -- the complexity of Tony's relationship to his son and his daughter alone is disturbing, nuanced, outrageous and a bit scary. The Fishers are simply a much less interesting ensemble.

Most of the problem, it seems, is Ball, a one-time playwright. With "American Beauty," he gained some cachet as a chronicler of the blacker side of American suburbia, but his TV career before that -- he worked on "Grace Under Fire," "Oh Grow Up" and "Cybill" -- is undistinguished. And "American Beauty," a teasing pastiche of feints, was hugely overrated.

The film was based on a cheat -- a schlub supposedly disliked by his wife and kid is played by the winning and likable Kevin Spacey. That's not necessarily Ball's fault, but the plot certainly was. In the end, after 90 minutes of suburban angst, the climax comes when a rigid military father (preposterously) thinks his son is having an affair with next-door neighbor Spacey and then (even more preposterously) walks over to proposition Spacey himself. Rejected, he then shoots Spacey, presumably in a fit of repressed homosexual rage.

The failure here is similar. Ball never actually goes for the jugular. Death is the ultimate black humor subject, and while we get the requisite queasy shots of sewn-up corpses and weeping widows, the family's perspective on it all is a little too serene. Isn't there something biting to be said about the rituals we go through at such a horribly vulnerable time? About those who profit from that vulnerability in those plush, kitschy funeral homes? In the end, in "Six Feet Under," death becomes them, and it shouldn't.

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