Six Feet Under: Season 1

Death is at the center of Six Feet Under, a show about a family and their funeral home. Every episode begins with a death and corpses are so abundant that you hardly notice many of them as being anything more than background props. But far from being a morbid show, Six Feet Under instead chooses to celebrate life. This places it far away from other HBO classics on the tonal spectrum. The Sopranos was angry and cynical, The Wire was brutally depressing, and even period pieces like Rome and Deadwood dealt with plenty of violence and unhappy endings. I haven't seen Oz yet, but that show takes place in a maximum security prison, and I can't imagine it's very light and airy in tone. But Six Feet Under kind of is. So far, at least. Rather than honing its focus sharply on all the grief and despair that comes with death, instead it tries to remind us what it means to be alive. That sounds kind of corny - I myself can't hear a phrase like that without picturing a hypothetical movie trailer for the "feel-good event of the year" with a OneRepublic song playing in the background as people laugh and hug and cry - but it actually kind of works.

The pilot episode opens with the death (setting a standard that has yet to be broken) of the funeral home owner and patriarch of the family. From here, we see the rest of the family come together to grieve. There's oldest son Nate, a free spirit of sorts who ran away from the family business because of how dark and depressing it was. Just a year or two younger than him is David, an uptight closeted gay man who's been running the show with Dad ever since Nate fled the coop. David is understandably irritated when it's revealed that he and Nate have been left equal stakes in the funeral home. Fifteen or more years younger than them is Claire, an angst-ridden (is there any other kind?) high school student embarrassed by her family's profession. And lastly there's Ruth, newly widowed, the mother of two bickering adult brothers and one angry teenage girl. Each of these four main characters has some independent stuff going on, which allowed most episodes to enjoy a well-balanced feel, plot-wise, despite such a small main cast. Episodic plots often focused on the loved ones of whoever kicked it at the beginning of the episode, but serialized stories were made out of, say, Nate's new girlfriend and her increasingly psychotic brother, or David's struggles to reconcile his homosexual lifestyle with his position as a deacon at a local church. Ruth deals with the world of dating and sexual liberation in her fifties and Claire just kind of slogs through high school, angry about how much it sucks. And of course, death is everywhere throughout it all, often affecting our main characters in interesting ways.

I liked the first season of Six Feet Under, and I liked it more the more I watched it. I wasn't particularly drawn to any of the characters initially, aside from David, played by Michael C. Hall in a very non-Dexter-like pre-Dexter role. But the stories don't demand too much patience and attention on the viewer's part, making this a fairly easy show to just pick up and run with, unlike something like The Wire. It was a decent enough first season and I'm looking forward to Season 2. Something tells me I should jump back to Big Love first though, and alternate my HBO seasons going forward. We'll see.