This is a rewatch. Other than Lost, which I barely count, Six Feet Under is the first drama series I’ve ever watched. We’re talking circa 2009, when all I had really seen up to this point was cartoons, Comedy Central, and plenty of Alton Brown. A sad, sheltered television existence.

I remember having a tense love/hate relationship with the show. Half, if not most, of the characters really suck ass. Some of the story arcs aren’t very interesting, and I only remember a few besides. There’s that one episode in Season 4 where David got kidnapped for a night, that one really stuck with me. My wife still hates that she watched it to this day. And yet, we plowed through the series pretty quickly, probably within a month and a half. It was near the end of spring semester of college. If there’s one thing that was captivating about Six Feet Under, it was the relentless morbidity. Don’t watch this show if you have anxiety or depression unless you have a blog that you can write about it in. Hey, that’s me!

There are only a few beats I remember about Season 1:
-David is an incredible slut.
-Billy is a lunatic.
-Claire dates an ugly, but nice, loser.

I also found Brenda incredibly attractive. And isn’t it the attractive people that makes us want to watch TV shows in the first place? It’s why I love The Wire! That Bunk can really melt my butter.

The Premise

The Fisher family owns and runs a Funeral home in Los Angeles. The head honcho and patriarch, Nathaniel Fisher (Richard Jenkins), dies in a car accident within the first ten minutes. Ownership of the funeral home gets transferred to his large adult sons Nate (Peter Krause) and David (Michael C. “Dexter” Hall). The former is a down-to-earth, laid-back 35-year-old. The latter is an uptight, no-nonsense 32-year-old. Nate doesn’t really want to help run the funeral home, but he steps up when necessary. David is a big fucking martyr about it and thinks he’s doing everything single-handedly. Which he kind of is. Nate spends a lot of time with his girlfriend Brenda Chenowith (Rachel Griffiths) and not a lot of time kissing the dead bodies in the downstairs morgue.

The other sibling is Claire, a 17-year-old high school student who gets shit for growing up in a funeral home. If she had her choice, she wouldn’t! Their mother is Ruth (Frances Conroy), who is even more uptight than David if you can believe it. I can! I’ve seen the show! Having recently become a widow, she struggles with expressing her emotions and it comes out in random volatile ways. She’s fucking Ed Begley Jr. and she works in a flower shop with a Russian immigrant named Nikolai. Nikolai wants to fuck Ruth.

There’s also Keith Charles, David’s on-again off-again cop boyfriend. Usually ACAB, you know? But Keith is a nice guy. There’s also Federico (Freddy Rodriguez), the often dissatisfied restorative artist of the funeral home. He ends up defecting to a major funeral service corporation for a few episodes, but returns for reasons that escape me. The Fishers are nice to him? They barely pay him. He’s the best in the business. There’s also Billy Chenowith (Jeremy Sisto), Brenda’s wack-a-loon bipolar younger brother. He’s jealous of Nate to the point where he 1) dates Claire for a couple episodes like a pedophile, and 2) threatens Nate directly at least two times. Nate ain’t havin’ it.

The Fisher family slowly implodes over the course of the season. David breaks up with Keith and scours chatrooms and nightclubs to get some random dick while trying to be deacon at his church, running the funeral home, and coming to terms with his sexuality. Claire dates an ugly, slightly mentally ill piece of shit named Gabe who, while nice to her, is quite stupid and somewhat dangerous. Brenda and Billy’s relationship is fraught with baggage they’ve been carrying for decades, and since Billy is totally in love with his sister he acts out in very harmful ways. Nate is often caught in the middle.

And Ruth is Ruth.

My Half-Baked Thoughts

A lot of this holds up well for pre-9/11 television. Clothing, hairstyles, and slang isn’t too dated. Homosexuality is handled with empathy (most because Six Feet Under‘s creator, Alan Ball, is gay). Characters are complex, all of them are fucked up, and they face pretty knotty conflicts.

Nate lived away from home when Nathaniel died, and most of his issues stem from regretting his lack of involvement with the family business and feeling bitter that he didn’t know his father very well. You could see it especially during the episode where Nate discovers Nathaniel’s secret room. Nate felt that his father was PACKED TO THE GILLS with secrets. Secrets coming out the wazoo and whatnot. Then later, when Gabe’s stepbrother Anthony accidentally shot himself, Nate projected his own bitterness at Anthony’s deadbeat father. Then, of course, he has to deal with Brenda and Billy. That’s a real trip.

Claire, as we see, deals with alienation at school. Frequent trips to the school psychologist suggests a problem with motivation and lack of direction. When she happens to get a boyfriend, he betrays almost immediately about the weird sexual toe-sucking kink he’s got. It takes a stepbrother’s death to get him back on her good side! But, mostly, she’s just an angsty teenager who really didn’t want to grow up in a funeral home. If I grew up in a funeral home I’d be playing Xbox all fucking day.

Ruth is emotionally repressed. Sexually repressed too, at least in her marriage. I’m sure Nathaniel was too busy to really give her the time of day, or else she wouldn’t have been fucking Stan Sitwell for years! When I first watched Six Feet Under I thought Ruth was a kind of a bitch, but I have a lot more sympathy for her now. You can tell she grew up learning to bottle up her emotions, and now they’re exploding out of her like dynamite.

David has got it the worst. Religious and gay? What a fantastic combination! I can’t see how that would irrevocably fuck someone up at all, man. The guy is wound up so fucking tight. Taking on double duty at the funeral home with dead dad. Dealing with a slacker older brother. WHAT’S A MAN TO DO? Oh, right, how about completely act out and do some hella drugs and go to hella gay bars and cruise for hella dick in hella chat rooms. David is a baller.

Then there’s Brenda and Billy. The latter goes without saying, whose bipolar disorder led to sorta statutory rape AND slicing his own tattoo off of his back. Nuts. You meet Brenda and Billy’s psychologist parents, who are so infuriatingly narcissistic that you realize it’s impossible for their kids to grow up, you know, normal and stable. Brenda is clearly trying to work on it, but she’s unintentionally roping Nate into a hellish roller coaster ride. The sex must be really good, otherwise, if I were Nate, I would’ve dumped her early on.

Brenda gets better, though! Well, she gets worst first! But then she gets better, I promise!

Worth the Watch?

Yes. This holds up very well. With the glut of good TV out there right now, Six Feet Under is an easy show to overlook. BUT DON’T! There are some bad storylines throughout its run, but everything does, so go fuck ya-self.

Just don’t get mad at Ruth. She’s going through a lot right now.