‘Six Feet Under’: It’s More Than Death

Memo to HBO: Sometimes it isn’t necessary to reinvent the wheel. Spinning it a little will do.

“Six Feet Under,” which will conclude its freshman season with back-to-back episodes Sunday, is beginning to attract the sort of loyal audience and critical acclaim that made “Sex and the City” and “The Sopranos” smash hits. But whether it will become as phenomenally successful as those groundbreaking shows isn’t really as significant as the fact that it is consistently good, and its quality has made it one of the only programs that game-and reality-show holdouts have looked forward to during this long, dull, there’s-nothing-to-watch-on-TV summer. Isn’t good enough?

Maybe not, because at first, it seemed “Six Feet Under” was hellbent on earning its iconoclast’s badge. After all, there’d never been a TV show about a family that runs a funeral home, much less one that mixed drama with dark humor and threw in some full-frontal male nudity as a bonus.

As unusual as that idea seemed to be, the formula of taking a family saga or a murder mystery and setting it in a specific subculture is one so thoroughly milked by TV series from “Columbo” to “Murder, She Wrote” that the mortuary milieu could have felt very last century. On those venerable shows, week after week, basic plots were set at a publishing house, a beauty pageant, a university or a race track. The scenery and jargon changed, and each new demimonde yielded a few stock characters.

Alan Ball, the Academy Award-winning writer who created “Six Feet Under,” began with what could have been perceived as a hackneyed TV gambit. He wasn’t intimidated by how TV had treated such setups before. That would have been akin to the women of “Sex and the City” abandoning the missionary position because it’s been done. It’s evident that Ball didn’t choose the wacky world of bereavement services only for its novelty. He and his creative team have made the dysfunctional Fisher clan complete products of their environment. They have been so thoroughly affected by living above the family business that they couldn’t be transplanted to a Texas ranch or a Boston law firm with their quirks intact.

What’s more difficult to talk about than death? It’s the one human experience that renders most people either speechless or platitudinous. For the family that’s adept at ignoring or euphemizing the unspeakable, avoiding any authentic communication becomes routine. Peter Krause, the brilliantly subtle actor who was ill-served as anchor Casey McCall in “Sports Night” and is reason enough to watch “Six Feet Under,” says, “People come up to me on the street and tell me there are elements of the Fisher family’s dynamic that remind them of their own families.” If millions of viewers are identifying with the Fishers, then secrets and denial are the bedrock of American family life.

To the show’s credit, it confronts mortality as energetically as the Fishers bury their feelings. Each episode begins with a death. Only one of the 13 bodies destined for a slab in their basement has been an elderly person who dies in her sleep. Among the others are a porn star who fries when electric curlers fall into her bathwater, a diseased Gulf War vet, a murdered gang member, a celebrating divorcee who inadvertently parties her way to the cemetery and a 3-week-old baby afflicted with Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

If the corpse of the week illustrates anything, it’s that no one knows when their time on Earth will end. Naturally, death--grisly, capricious and cruel--is a constant presence at Fisher & Sons. The truth is, it is in everyone else’s life as well. The rest of us get to forget that much of the time, but “Six Feet Under” has a reason for wanting to remind us.

Brothers Nate (Krause) and David Fisher (Michael C. Hall) worry about cash flow and cope with employee problems. Unlike other businessmen, their workday also includes contemplating death in all its metaphysical grandeur. David’s a repressed, closeted homosexual beginning to experiment with drugs and anonymous sex dressed in his teenage sister’s snug T-shirts. Nate, a sweet-natured lady-killer, has finally fallen in love at 35, with a sometimes tender, often maddening, and possibly insane woman (Rachel Griffiths) whose family could give Machiavelli pointers. The contrast between these odd young funeral directors grappling with their lives while dealing with people looking for answers to the great questions of existence is bizarre and touching.

It is also strangely entertaining. Laurence Andries, a “Six Feet Under” writer and supervising producer, says when he first told friends about what he was writing, their reaction was, why would anyone want to watch that? It sounds so depressing. “What they’re getting now,” he says, “is that the show is far more about living than about death.”

Being depressing was only one potential fate the show faced. It could have come off preachy or maudlin, or worse, dished up servings of New Age spirituality. Thanks to a tone that veers unexpectedly from wickedly funny to deeply emotional, viewers who wouldn’t be caught dead, so to speak, tuning in to “Touched by an Angel” have been drawn to a series that is simultaneously subversive and life-affirming.

After months of trying to soothe people mourning relatives taken too soon, in the ninth episode Nate dispenses with cliches and articulates the truth that’s been lurking in the show’s subtext. Trying to calm the belligerent father of a 6-year-old who accidentally blew his head off with a gun found under his mother’s bed, he says, “Everybody dies. Some of us live to be 100. Some of us never make it through our first day. That’s just a fact of nature, pal. You can punch as many people as you want and that’s not going to change the fact that boy is dead. Your chance to be in his life is over. Did you use that time well, or did you just throw it away? Your own freakin’ life is a ticking clock too. Everybody’s is.”

In other words, make each day count. It’s a simple, almost Oprah-esque message, one that’s been at the core of dramas from “Our Town” to “It’s a Wonderful Life” to “The Big Chill.” If the substance is plain, the show’s creators made sure its style would be fancy. After the corpse of the week is introduced, each episode has unfolded differently, employing a deliberately uneven mix of the comic and tragic and an array of storytelling devices, including flashbacks, dream sequences and hallucinations as goofy as any Ally McBeal ever imagined. The quest to escape the ordinary is obvious, yet “Six Feet Under” isn’t afraid to be heartwarming too.

As in “The Big Chill,” a death is the cataclysmic event that spins the story into motion, a conventional dramatic maneuver that hardly breaks new ground. The guest corpse in the pilot is patriarch Nathaniel Fisher (Richard Jenkins), who might have lived another 30 years if his hearse hadn’t been rammed by a bus the day before Christmas.

When Nate gets the news, he’s just finished having sex in a janitor’s closet at LAX with a woman he met on his flight home. Ah, the siren song of the passionate crazy girl. Poor Nate skipped the chapter that explains that a zip-less encounter with a brainy, neurotic woman with a tortured family history isn’t meant to blossom into a relationship. Nate’s spent his 20s and early 30s postponing adulthood. When he learns half the business has been left to him, some reevaluation is in order.

In the wake of Nathaniel’s death, every one of the surviving Fishers must see themselves, and each other, in new ways. Besides Nate and David, there’s Claire (Lauren Ambrose), a bundle of adolescent agony wrapped in baby fat and their well-meaning control-freak mother Ruth (Frances Conroy). Nathaniel visits each of their daydreams occasionally, his appearance underscoring the pain death stirs in the living for whatever’s unexplored and unfinished: Daddy, we hardly knew you.

“In the first few episodes, there are a lot of shots of Nate sleeping,” Krause says. “His father dying wakes him out of a stupor. In the beginning, Nate can’t see beyond his own wants and needs.”

What a perfect description of childhood. “Six Feet Under” could be subtitled “The Sentimental Education of Nate Fisher.” It is his coming-of-age story, in which he returns home and becomes a man. In a more pedestrian series, Nate would be a stereotypical rogue or a male Mary Tyler Moore--the sane, lovable center around which a cast of crazies swirls. Krause is too complex an actor to be that (he could be his generation’s Robert Redford, but with layers). As Nate, he manages to be flawed, yet so essentially kind that watching his innate decency triumph over his selfishness has been one of the greatest pleasures the show offers.

Since “Six Feet Under’s” way of being groundbreaking is to take a traditional form and tweak it, while Nate comes of age, so does everyone else in his family. Growing into adulthood, with its accompanying self-knowledge, used to be a rite of passage reserved for the young. Baby boomers, who never want to get old and aren’t so crazy about maturity either, must warm to the notion that coming of age can be experienced repeatedly, after a variety of birthdays.

All the Fishers are single, which means that their task in growing up may be to accept and understand themselves well enough to be known, and loved, by someone else. The series holds great promise for romantics. So far, the major characters have made amorous choices so wrongheaded as to incite screaming at the TV set. They could blame accidents of timing, but Claire and Nate picked wounded, possibly doomed birds to rescue. David and his mother are arrested-development cases run amok.

Those Fishers can be infuriating, but they’re certainly not a dull bunch.

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“Six Feet Under’s” season finale will be shown 9 p.m. Sunday on HBO. The network has rated it TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children younger than 17).