Robin says that for her, Six Feet Under was serendipitous. There weren’t that many people giving notes, and the notes that we got were good, smart ones.” “I don’t want to say that HBO didn’t have any creative input, because of course they did, but it was minimal.
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“For Six Feet Under, I had to unlearn what I had learnt working in network TV,” he adds, explaining that he had “learnt how to basically anticipate” the notes executives would give him (“usually ‘make everybody nicer’ and ‘articulate the subtext’”). “That was where everybody wanted to be working,” says Ball. And HBO was almost unilaterally behind this sea change.
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All of a sudden, TV was being regarded as Art, as capable of metaphor and nuance as any other medium. No longer was TV drama simply to be gawked at, eaten in front of, and forgotten.
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Along with series including The Sopranos (1999-2007), The Wire (2002-2008), and Deadwood (2004-2006), Six Feet Under was part of TV’s “Golden Age” revolution. Six Feet Under’s premise grew from an idea given to him by HBO executive Carolyn Strauss. Rounding out the series regulars were Brenda (Rachel Griffiths), Nate’s lover and troubled daughter of two psychiatrists, Federico (Freddy Rodriguez), the money-minded family man with a talent for restoring cadavers, and Keith (Mathew St Patrick), David’s lover, a cop with a temper. And there’s Claire (Lauren Ambrose), the wild-child youngest daughter with ambitions to be an artist.
There’s David ( Michael C Hall), the uptight and (at first) closeted middle sibling, who carries on his father’s work at the funeral home.
There’s Ruth (Frances Conroy), Nathaniel’s widow, an eccentric and repressed woman who married young and undergoes a later-in-life sexual awakening. There’s Nate Jr (Peter Krause), the idealistic eldest son who left home at 18 and is reluctantly drawn back into the family business. Winning nine Emmys and three Golden Globes over the course of its run, the show focused on the Fishers, a family of undertakers running the California funeral home Fisher & Sons, whose patriarch Nathaniel (Richard Jenkins) is killed in a shock car accident just minutes into the pilot. “There had never really been a show like that, about that subject. “I feel like what the show is about is pretty timeless,” Ball tells me. Six Feet Under was a series that looked death square in the face, scrutinising every mole and crevice. Of all the conservative media taboos that Alan Ball’s pioneering TV drama would flout – and there were a lot of them, from meth-smoking schoolkids to gay threesomes to mass shootings – none was more challenging to the “feelgood” conventions of television than its candid, no-holds-barred treatment of death. When it comes to exploring death on-screen, there has never been a better, funnier, more humanistic example than Six Feet Under, first broadcast 20 years ago today. But in 2001, Six Feet Under blew all precedents away. Perhaps the 20th century’s finest example was Twin Peaks, which shocked the world in 1990 with its raw, protracted look at the murder of a teenage girl, diving into a community’s grief without offering any easy or coherent answers. But for the better part of a century, TV skirted around the edges of death, avoiding the unknowable black hole at the heart of it. Of course, it has featured on TV since the medium’s earliest days – as a storytelling device, a set-up for a mystery, a story twist or even a convenient means of explaining an actor’s departure. Like most of us, television has always tended to shy away from death.