“Six Feet Under” by Alan Ball

Alan Ball’s “Six Feet Under” is the quintessential prestige drama about death and life as it focuses on a family of funeral directors in Los Angeles. Debuting on American TV on June 3, 2001, it gave stories to characters who were previously unseen in the TV canon and re-examined death at a critical moment in American history.

At the beginning of each episode, someone dies, and an element of that person’s death serves as a unifying theme for all of the Fishers’ stories while they prepare the body. The pilot is no different. After patriarch Nathaniel Fisher (Richard Jenkins) dies en route to picking up prodigal son Nate (Peter Krause) at the airport, Nate decides to come home and re-assimilate into his quirky family. Taking the reins of the family business with closeted brother David (Michael C. Hall), Nate learns how to make amends for his absence to his repressed mother Ruth (Frances Conroy) and teenage sister Claire (Lauren Ambrose). Over the next few seasons, he faces his relational conflict with present girlfriend Brenda (Rachel Griffiths) and former girlfriend Lisa (Lili Taylor) while facing his own mortality. (He’s diagnosed with an arteriovenous malformation (AVM) late in Season One).

“The Sopranos,” its HBO contemporary, may have overshadowed “Six Feet Under” in terms of popularity, but “Six Feet” gave life to characters and story lines never fully explored on television before. After David comes out and starts dating police officer Keith, the series deftly represents a modern interracial gay relationship. The series also illustrates the terrifying highs and lows of Billy, Brenda’s bipolar brother, while never caving to stereotypes. Federico (Freddy Rodriguez), Fisher & Sons’ in-house mortician, is a fully-developed Latinx character who yearns, and even receives, a stake in this all-white family business.

The iconic Season One image
Credit: HBO)

Most importantly, “Six Feet Under” broached the conversation about death that the U.S. needed to have after 9/11 and the years of the Iraq War. Death tends to be an overwhelming subject, but “Six Feet Under” normalized it (and even made it funny) with its darkly comical tone. And with more than 63 deaths portrayed in the series, the creators show that some are sad, others strange, others tragic, and some can even be funny.

As creator Alan Ball has said,

“…I think [the series] is about life. I think death is a part of life, and I think the thing that appealed to me about this idea when it was first pitched to me was who are these people who live in the constant presence of death? Who are these people that we pay to face death for us? And how does that affect their lives? Now not ever having been a funeral director, I can only guess, but it seemed to me like it would actually throw life into sort of a sharper relief against the backdrop of constant death, and that’s sort of the starting point that I took off from.”