TV That Settles: Six Feet Under

It's been 20 years since the debut of the show about death. Does it still live?

Weird note: I started writing this when HBO was running a Six Feet Under marathon to celebrate the shows 15th anniversary. I never finished it and it sat in my Drafts folder for five years, and I figured it would remain there forever. Now I just discovered that the show is celebrating it's 20th anniversary, so I figured I would finish and post it. I don't really remember where I was going with it five years ago, so it may ramble a little, but I think, with most people still quarantined and dealing with a pandemic, now is the time to revisit it. I had to edit out the first paragraph because it started out talking about the 15th anniversary, and added an ending, of course, but this is mostly what I wrote five years ago.

If you haven't seen it, the show chronicles the trials and tribulations of the Fisher family and their immediate close contacts. The Fishers have been running Fisher and Sons funeral home for many years, but while good boy David has remained to become the "Son," older and hippier Nate Fisher has gone out into the world, never having any desire to be a funeral director. High school-age daughter Claire is, well, in high school and kind of whacked. But she drives a lime green hearse to school every day, so she's pretty cool. Ruth is the doting wife who does all the cooking and cleaning for everyone. All is well until Nathaniel Fisher, Sr, the real funeral director, is killed in a car accident on Christmas day. It basically all goes to Hell from there. The point of killing him off in the first episode? To show that even people who are in the death business don't necessarily know how to handle it.

As with most shows, the early episodes, when you're not as emotionally connected to any of the characters, are a little bit harder to watch, and the writers rely heavily on shock value. For example, Nate meets Brenda on a plane and, upon landing,  they instantly  have sex in an airport broom closet. And Nate is our main character, who is supposed to be in his late thirties. I don't know know whether to high-five him or groan at the utter absurdity of it. The good news is that the show got better, and as an example, they actually use that rather awkward introduction as fodder when Nate and Brenda have their bitter break-up at the end of Season 2. After he discovers that she has been sleeping with tons of other guys (and strangely writing a "fictitious" book about it), she says that he knew what he was getting into, choosing to remain with a girl that he had banged mere hours after meeting her (and in a disgusting broom closet!) Meanwhile, Nate has actually gotten another woman pregnant, so his moral high ground is somewhat suspect.

Like I said, once they got past a lot of the boring, soap opera-y drama (Will Nate pass his funeral director's test? Will David be gay? Find out on tonight's episode!), the show really picked up steam, with each character having pretty significant story arcs throughout the final three seasons that made the show really compelling. Ball's goal seemed to be to show that we're all on the road to the grave, and his characters were usually in the passing lane.

*David and his boyfriend, Keith, have a very on-again-off again relationship, but do end up staying together and adopting two kids, way before they mined that kind of thing for comedy on Modern Family. He was also car-jacked and beaten in one episode, and had a little trouble dealing with that. That episode got a lot of attention at the time for its grittiness and realism, but I found it a little off-the-rails for this show, and frankly, needlessly brutal. But I guess you were supposed to feel something.

*Claire takes the advice of her aunt and goes to an art school, where she discovers that she has innate photography skills. She also discovers orgasms. Plus, her crazy art teacher, Olivier, sleeps with her boyfriend, leading to their break-up, but not before she became pregnant and decided to have an abortion. She later drops out after trying lesbianism for a bit. It's typical college stuff, really, but captured so well that you feel for her. When she debates whether or not she's actually an artist while working a "real job," her aunt tells her, "Maybe you don't have the knack." I always found that moment to be pretty awesome. I think it perfectly sums up the ignorance of youth. Claire also crashes her hearse in the final few episodes, so even the car doesn't live through the show. She does end up becoming a big-time photographer, anyway, but that was probably more just to wrap up her storyline than anything else. Someone has to end on a high note.

*Ruth actually ends up being the most active of them all, dating a Russian florist, her hair-dresser, the funeral home's intern, and ends up marrying a geology professor whom she learns has been married five times before. Those oldsters get around. He ends up going crazy, though, and she is kind of left holding the bag. They never really had a come-to-Jesus moment, but they did stay together, so good for them.

*Nate...Ah, Nate. As I said earlier, Nate and Brenda date for the first couple seasons and get engaged, but break up when he discovers her infidelity. He then has surgery to repair a brain tumor that he had recently discovered, and that perspective allows him to settle down and marry the mother of his child, Lisa. It isn't long before he kind of wants out, however, and he gets his wish when she abruptly disappears. After three agonizing episodes searching for Lisa, and getting drunk and sleeping around, he receives a call from the police that she is dead. Months later, we learn that she was having an affair with her brother-in-law and he apparently killed her when she broke it off, which lead to some speculation that Nate's child may not even be his. Nate ends up back with Brenda, and this time doesn't end well, either, and he sleeps with his step-sister (Ruth's husband's daughter. Are we following all this? Trust me, they were passed the soap-opera-y drama.), only to then fall victim to the same brain disease that had befallen him in season 2, and this time, he dies. So, his father, wife and now himself... all gone. Now that's a life shrouded in death.

By the way, all of this happens while Nathaniel Sr. is talking to all of them in crazy visions. My favorite is when Claire talks to him, because her interpretation of death is that it's a big, ol' carnival!

Since, it's been twenty years, a lot has changed in the world, and my own life, obviously. I remember when I first saw the show that I identified with Claire a little more than the rest of them. She was a young, temperamental, slightly pretentious artist, who couldn't get out of her own way when it came to relationships, and even though I never really considered myself an artist, I got the temperamental and pretentious parts down. I remember the powerful scene where she confronted her teacher about her semester's work (and the whole sleeping with her boyfriend thing), and he told her that her technique was brilliant, but that's all it was, that her work was safe and "limited." When I was taking screenwriting classes in college, I made a similar discovery about myself. We were work-shopping my script in class when one of my classmates made a suggestion about a scene I wrote where a man gets hit by a car. He said that the guy's head should just fly clean off on impact. When I suggested that such a thing probably wouldn't happen, he said, "Who cares?" I'm not sure if he ever went on to write any major screenplays, but he knew how to grab your attention. Maybe he wrote some episodes of this show.

Thing is, though, Olivier isn't just talking about art, he's giving her a little life lesson, as he goes on to say that "if you take a chance you could fall flat on your face, but that's the best thing that can ever happen to you, as an artist and as a human being." She is too much in her own head most of the time, just like I was. "You sit in such judgment of the world," he tells her, "How can you ever expect to be part of it?" I was, and still am, guilty of that, as are a lot of people. Just go on any social media app. It's all judgment. And this show came out in 2003.

Claire, to her credit, gives it right back to him, accusing him of using his students "to work through your own personal shit." It's another big life lesson for her, one that she actually taught herself, because she was once inspired by this guy, and now she sees how flawed he is. It is a big eye-opener when we realize that our mentors are really just people. Flawed, occasionally stupid people. We may feel like an idiot for even being inspired by them in the first place, but we shouldn't. We're not perfect, and neither are they.

Speaking of which, that brings us to Nate. Nate was the lifeblood of the show, and it was really his journey that we were on. We follow him through his new life as a funeral director, his engagement falling apart, fatherhood, becoming a widower, and then getting married again, and then his death. All the while, he screws most of it up. If it wasn't for his daughter, whom he definitely did love, he screwed everything up. But, as his step-dad, played by James Cromwell, and in his own redemptive moment after being a bit whacked in the previous season says at the funeral, "Nate was an idealist, and he struggled all through his life to be a good man." 

As I said, he dies of a ruptured AVM, but because Ball and his writers liked to put their characters and his audience through the worst things possible, he dies with three episodes left. It's plays perfectly into what the show was about, how people must carry on after the death of a loved one. The night before he died, Nate has slept with his step-sister, who had to tell the doctors what happened with his pregnant wife standing right there. Nate, like his father had done for the last five seasons, comes back to "haunt" his family in their visions. He embodies Brenda's guilt, Claire's ambition, and Ruth's inner sadness.

But that is fifth season Nate. There are so many great moments leading up to that. Early on in season one, for example, he discovers that his father used to sometimes exchange funeral services for payment other than money, including car repairs and free marijuana. Then he finds out that rather than take money for a funeral, he allowed a restaurant owner to pay him in a free studio apartment that was above his restaurant. While doing all of this digging, Nate also learns that not only was his father a funny guy who got high, but he also admired Nate for leaving home a a young age and striking out on his own. Through all of this, Nate realizes that he never really knew his father at all.

During the second season, Nate has settled into being a funeral director and has discovered that he has a knack for consoling the bereaved. Unfortunately, he is also having seizures related to his brain condition, he and Brenda are having all kinds of problems, and he has gotten his ex Lisa pregnant. Meanwhile, the one constant in his life is that he has promised a young man dying of cancer that he will come to see him every day, to help ease the young man's passing, and also to give Nate a raison d'etre. One day, Nate arrives at the clinic to find that the man has died. So not only has Nate lost a friend and a reason to keep going, he has to facilitate the man's cremation. Only on Six Feet Under...     

He is at least now motivated to have the necessary brain surgery now, which means he has to tell Ruth about his condition, which makes for an incredible scene. It also leads to one of the rare, but deeply moving moments that I believe make the show; the surgery is taking place the same time as Claire's High School Graduation, so Ruth decides that David will go an film the graduation ceremony while she takes Nate to the hospital. When they all protest that they would rather be at the hospital to support their brother, Ruth fires back, "This is what we're doing!" (Even though she was mostly very sweet, Angry Ruth was by far the best character on the show) Despite the tongue-lashing, Claire and David skip the ceremony and go to the hospital, and the season ends with the three family members holding hands in the waiting room in silent prayer.

A similar moment happens at the end of the third season. Lisa's car has been found a couple of hours away, and Nate is staying at a nearby motel to wait in case she returns. She has been missing for days, and Nate has spent that time drinking, getting in bar fights and screwing around. He is alone with his thoughts, imagining all the horrible things that could have happened to his wife (or worst of all, she left him), when he hears a knock on the door. He opens it to find David and Claire. who made the trip because they thought he "could use some company."

This is why the show resonates with me. Sure, it's unique in the way it deals with death the way no other show has before or since, but that's just the hook. What keeps folks watching are the characters and how much they love each other, despite their flaws and hang-ups. They all get put through the wringer (the car-jacking, the brain tumor, the abortion) for five season, but when the chips are really down, they all are there for each other. They get on each other's nerves and fight just like any family, but in the end, they are family and stand with each other. That is why it is all the more tragic when Nate dies, because they do start to move apart after that.

 Now, I feel I have to mention the series finale. Spoiler warning, but if you haven't seen it, it shows Claire beginning her cross-country drive towards a new life in New York, and we are given glimpses into the future and we see the deaths of all the major characters, presented the same way as the deaths were presented at the beginning of each episode. Due to how the show worked, we don't know if this was simply Claire's vision of how she saw everyone dying, or of this was the show creators telling the viewer, "Show's over! So long!" I guess it's really both, but obviously, since it is a glimpse into the future, there is a little room for more stories to be told. Personally, I was always a little conflicted by the finale, because I thought a lot of the deaths seemed a little frivolous for a show where death was always treated so seriously (Brenda literally being talked to death by her brother, for example). I always had a theory that the creators were making sure that HBO wouldn't ask them to come back for another season by killing everyone, as The Sopranoss and Sex in the City had both ended and the network was left without any real tentpoles. I had no proof to back that up, of course. But now, since it has been 16 years since the finale, I realize that I was just conflicted and searching for explanations because the show may have ended too soon, and that is how life (and death) is. We were supposed to feel a little uncomfortable about it. Truly, death affects everyone, even people just watching a show about it.

Despite the length of this post, I feel I have barely scratched the surface of what this show is about (Claire's art teacher would definitely chastise me for being too safe). But I think now, twenty years later, and with the global pandemic still raging and claiming lives of thousands, it's a perfect time to revisit the show. It’s readily available to stream, so you can watch it and decide if it really does settle well. Or in this case, maybe “unsettling” was what they were going for.