Six Feet Under, 2001-2005

One of the weird ironies of the past six months is that I've never written or talked so much about television before in my life, and yet -- thanks to the "content agnostic" argument of Everything Bad -- I've had almost nothing to say about the aesthetic or cultural merits of any of the shows I've been discussing. But I can't let the series finale of Six Feet Under on Sunday night pass by without a few closing thoughts about the show.

I've felt since season two that Six Feet, at its best, was just about as good as anything that's ever been on American TV. I sometimes felt that the show suffered slightly from its creators not being fully aware of what made it so good, a perspective problem that led it down some unnecessarily dark alleys. (Literally in the case of the notorious torture episode with David.) Because it was first and foremost a show about death, I think Alan Ball et al. assumed that people were tuning in because of all the darkness. But I think the true beauty of the show was its weird hopefulness in the face of all that darkness. What kept me so attached to the show were those little glimmers, like the evolving friendship between David and Nate in the first seasons. When the show faltered, I think its problems stemmed from its growing too dependent on the gloom -- on the madness and murder and suicides -- and losing that very careful balance between dark and light that it had at its best moments.

A few other thoughts on what made it so original:

Death. Obviously it's a show about death, but I think some of the commentary about this has it slightly wrong. You always hear that Six Feet was so refreshing because the rest of the culture is so resolute in its death-denying ways. But I don't think that's right exactly -- death is far more common on your average television drama than it is in most of our lives. (Think CSI, Law and Order, Sopranos, etc.) What's rare is the willingness to think about the aftermath of death, which is the world that Six Feet explored so powerfully. People are always dying on the screen. What you never see is what their surviving family looks like two months later.

L.A. I've always thought that it was a brilliant and hugely original portrait of Los Angeles, though I've had a lot of resistance to the idea when I've made that argument to people in conversation. Part of the problem seems to be the Fisher house itself, which is so perversely non-L.A. that people can't seem to get around it. But so many of the other details seem exactly right to me, and entirely fresh -- aspects of the city that never make it into the standard Beverly Hills cliches: Claire's art school scene, Brenda's burned out, vaguely cultish psychologist parents, the sixties holdouts around Ruth's sister, Rico's middle-class hispanic family. Six Feet's relationship to LA is particularly striking, because HBO now has three (!!) separate shows set in the exact same agents-and-cell-phones milieu that we've seen a thousand times since Tony Roberts moved to LA in Annie Hall. So I was pleased to read Alan Ball's comments to Heather Havrilesky in Salon this week: "... we tried very hard to capture the kind of surreal, hazy air, baked-out existential feel of Los Angeles instead of the palm tree one that you see in movies, but also all the back roads where the paint is flaking, and most of Los Angeles is really, really ugly. We tried to capture that, and just the weirdness of living in Los Angeles, especially the weirdness of living in L.A. if you're not in the entertainment industry."

Grunge. This is a subtler element, but I've always felt that Six Feet was one of the very few popular narratives that internalized whatever cultural shift happened with Nirvana in the early nineties. Both Nate and Claire always seemed like distinctly post-Kurt-Cobain characters to me -- outsiders intrigued by drugs and contemptuous of mainstream society who were at the same time resolutely NOT hippies. This seems to be a somewhat conscious theme for Ball as well -- when we meet Nate in the first episode, he's working at a health food co-op in Seattle, and one of the last flashbacks we see of him is his giving Claire her first joint while grieving Kurt Cobain's suicide.

Drugs. Has there ever been a show with such constant drug use, and so little moralizing about it?

Finally, Nate. Heather Havrilesky is hands down my favorite TV critic right now, but it seems to me she has a bizarre vendetta against Nate. I loved the exchange in the Alan Ball interview where she asks a few questions that work under the assumption that Nate is a loathsome bastard, and Ball responds with what I think is a much more accurate assessment of what was so striking about his character: "I have a tremendous amount of sympathy for Nate and his desire to get to the root of things and be authentic. And I think he is always [Pauses] he's difficult to describe because he's so complicated. Probably what is at the root of a lot of his less than noble actions is that, while not serving those who he's committed to well, there's something admirable, on some level, about still having this childlike hope of finding the right thing. Because there is the notion of, you know, you grow up, you lose your illusions, whatever, and you have to do that to become a functioning adult in society, but there is something fundamental that gets lost, a kind of joy. So I find him to be a deeply tragic character and a deeply romantic character. Whether I would say he's just a garden-variety asshole, no, I don't think so at all." That mix seems totally original to me (particularly when you factor in the post-grunge specifics), just as David's character, in its different way, seemed totally original. You watched those two and thought: I've never quite seen someone like this on television before. Claire was equally hypnotic to watch, but I always felt that her character had evolved out of My So-Called Life, so it was just a tad more familiar.

There's more to say, but I should probably just let go. I had a genuine feeling last night watching the finale that I was going to miss these people, which I can honestly say I've never had with a television show before. I suspect I'm not alone in feeling that way.

Comments

[scola]

As an aside -- watching that Nirvana scene, when Nate said something along the lines of that Kurt Cobain "was just too pure for this world," I snickered. A few seconds passed and then I thought "hey, maybe he's onto something." That, for me, was one thing that SFU meant -- letting down my guard enough to consider the madness and wonderfulness that is life. It was a rockin' good show.

[tn]

Not that you wrote this, but howcome everybody thinks that all TV shows get worse in the later seasons? I've heard that about 6 Feet, but I totally do not agree. That show was hard to get into at first (David's character was very annoying - just as annoying as the old mother was in Sopranos) but the show has just gone mental in the end. I loved it.

[seamus]

Great comments, and I couldn't agree more with your analysis of the show. Since you don't permit trackbacks, I posted comments here:
http://rangelife.typepad.com/rangelife/2005/08/six_feet_grunge.html

[Michael Dietsch]

It's a shame that the Salon site pass made me sit through an ad for the DVD collection of Six Feet Under before I could read an article about Six Feet Under.

[uncle willy]

Insightful and enjoyable comments. But . . . Alan. Not Allen.

[Steve Portigal]

How did you feel when MASH ended?

[Erik Kastner]

This is the first show that I really... felt for since the first season and a half of Twin Peaks (an aside: how do you think Twin Peaks would do in today's TV climate?)
I have an ambivalance towards Nate. I didn't hate him, didn't love him - there were flashes of both, but over all it was more... "I know that guy..." I think Claire and Ruth were the best and most complex by far.
I really like your fresh perspective on the points you touched on (post grunge, LA, etc). It has made me look at it in a new light.

I think another (semi) fresh thing that the show used was dead characters as a device to expose the livings' inner thoughts (ex cept for claire finding out that Lisa was dead before everyone else).

I wish there was a way to stay up long enough to watch them all in a row - The evolution was amazing.

[Seppo]

Stereogum.com posted a couple of MP3s of Sia's Breathe Me, the final song in the final montage that succeeds in turning on the waterworks more than any moment in TV history. Sia Furler hails from Adelaide, Ben Fold's Australian home, and the only place I've ever attended a foam party. Sia is also one of the vocalists contributing to the work of Zero 7, and has done stuff with a lot of the Bristol triphop aristocracy.

[michael]

this is the first show i've ever watched where i felt so involved in the characters. i've greived and felt happy for these people. their "lives" can greatly affect my mood in my real life for days. i will miss them as well. the thing that i felt made the show so special was the depth of the characters, all of them, even the side characters. they were multi-faceted individuals that i felt all had complex back-stories in the minds of the writers and while the writers did not always reveal the whole backstory of a character, they did not shy away from letting the complexities of the characters shine through in their actions.

[Kirsten]

I was sobbing when the show went through its final sequence to that beautiful, lilting, haunting music. I will miss these characters with all theri flaws and flights of fancy so much. I will miss the cinematography and circumstance, the sets and the scenarios.

[jen]

you bring up a fantastic point with the "grunge" factor - i was never into nirvana at all but you make a good point about nate and claire ... i always related to them the most and as being extremely like my friends and myself (persons born between... 77-82 or so?) - all of us trying to eek out a beter place in the world at least for ourselves and people we immediately impact.

6FU has been the only show i've ever watched from start to finish (i think i got hooked just a few episodes into the first season and caught up in those marathon re-runs HBO runs). many people i know cried at the last episode... people who are not known for crying [easily]. ruth finally coming to terms and accepting and offering help to brenda, ruth telling claire she HAS to go to new york (making ruth a much more central character than she ever seemed, i thought)...

bravo.
i must now read the salon article. :)

[free pacific poker game]

Take your time to visit the pages dedicated to free pacific poker free pacific poker http://www.antiquejunkyard.com/ http://www.antiquejunkyard.com/ ... Thanks!!!

[world series of poker merchandise]

You may find it interesting to visit the pages in the field of texas holdem poker online texas holdem poker online http://www.adspoll.com/texas-holdem-poker.html http://www.adspoll.com/texas-holdem-poker.html ...