NYLON - September 2008 - (Page 162) THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH? FOUR WRITERS ARGUE THEIR CASES. SIX FEET UNDER 162 FIORELLA VALDESOLO DOESN’T FEAR THE REAPER. ILLUSTRATION BY BOB LONDON On Six Feet Under, death was not a concept that was buried. The titular colloquialism refers specifically to the idea that there should be a substantial distance between the living and the dead, but that comfortable space never existed on Alan Ball’s HBO series, which is precisely why it was so, well, groundbreaking. Over the course of its five-year run, I never missed an episode. So devoted was I to this show about death, I organized my calendar around it. All it took to hook me was the opening credits. Thomas Newman’s haunting theme song, a lonely piano interrupted by sharp, repetitive pizzicato and chilling horns, was the backdrop for simple, surreal imagery: clasped hands drifting apart, the slowl-moving wheels of a gurney, the back of a hearse, a black crow, a pot of flowers wilting, a toe tag hanging from the foot of a corpse. Before it even started, I knew that this wouldn’t be typical TV fare—it was, after all, on HBO, a channel known for breaking staid broadcasting conventions—but from that opening sequence, I was convinced that I was in for something truly special. I was right. It was impossible not to be enamored with these characters. Fisher family patriarch Nathaniel (Richard Jenkins), who is killed in the pilot, reappeared repeatedly to his family, usually offering sage bits of advice delivered with wry sarcasm. His buttoned-up, propriety-obsessed wife Ruth (Frances Conroy), realized, after his death, that she has been blindly devoted to her family and so embarked on a mission of reinvention: starting a career as a florist, enrolling in cultish self-help seminars, and dating various men (the chefturned-hairdresser; the Russian; and, finally, George, whom she marries). Freespirited Nate (Peter Krause) ran away from his macabre upbringing, only to return and devote himself to the family business he so despised. He struggled with his health (he had a life-threatening brain disorder), his chosen career path, and the women who were the great loves of his life—tormented, sex addict Brenda (Rachel Griffiths), hippy dippy Lisa (Lili Taylor), and Maggie (Tina Holmes) who would unwittingly become his angel of death. Younger brother David’s (Michael C. Hall) struggle was always more internal—a conservative control freak and devout Catholic, he was tormented by the reality of his homosexuality. He repeatedly engaged in high-risk behavior and fretted over the idea of intimacy with partner Keith. Wild child Claire (Lauren Ambrose), the deeply cynical youngest Fisher, was an aspiring artist whose arc could be traced by her string of mostly terrible relationships: Gabe, the high school miscreant; Billy, Brenda’s mentally unstable brother; Russell, the gay college classmate; and Ted, the straitlaced lawyer. The beauty of the Fisher clan lay in the stark realism that rendered them totally relatable, even at their most fucked up. Six Feet Under was honest, often brutally so. Each episode began with a death—straightforward (old age), brutal (murdered at gunpoint), or even freakish (chopped to bits by an industrial flour mixer)—that set the tone for the familial drama that followed. Often, as might be expected from a show Ball called his “existential soap opera,” the living would learn from the deceased. A fatal gay bashing forced David to think about his own stunted views on homosexuality; when a college athlete succumbed to heat stroke, Nate faced up to the possibility of his own premature death. With all the graphic violence on TV, Six Feet Under remained one of the only shows to actually confront death. Though human despair was laid bare on a weekly basis, there was also humor—whenever I watched it, I either laughed or cried. And at the end, the series finale of this oddball show had me weeping. Because as macabre a topic as it revolved around, the result was not depressing. In fact, it was quite the opposite. I remember a conversation that Nate had with a mourner at the end of the first season. The woman asked, “why do people have to die?” And he replied, “to make life important.” And that was true about Six Feet Under—it made death an important fact of life, and for that it is immortal.
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