Six Feet Under

Six Feet Under is an American television drama created by Alan Ball that was originally broadcast from 2001 to 2005. It was produced by Alan Ball, Alan Poul, Robert Greenblatt and David Janollari. The series centers on Fisher & Sons Funeral Home, a family-run mortuary, and explores the lives of the Fisher family following the death of the family patriarch. It is set in modern-day Los Angeles. The title is a colloquialism for death, six feet (1.83 metres) being the traditional depth at which a corpse is buried.

Six Feet Under was produced by Actual Size Films and The Greenblatt/Janollari Studio. It first aired on HBO in 2001, and has been broadcast in syndication in the US by basic cable channel Bravo as well as in dozens of other countries. The series ended its five year run on August 21, 2005.

The show received critical acclaim from Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and The New York Times, among other media, and has garnered praise from fellow television producers and funeral directors, with many considering it to be one of the best dramas ever made for television. In total, Six Feet Under won three Golden Globe Awards and nine Emmy Awards, as well as a Peabody Award. The series won the Golden Globe award for Outstanding Drama Series and Best Supporting Actress for Rachel Griffiths in 2002. Frances Conroy went on to receive the award for Best Actress in a Drama for the Golden Globes in 2004. The show also won the Screen Actors Guild award for Best Ensemble for a Drama Series two years in a row (2003–2004).

The show stars Peter Krause as Nathaniel Samuel ("Nate") Fisher Jr., the son of a funeral director who, upon the death of his father (Richard Jenkins), reluctantly becomes a partner in the family funeral business with his brother David, played by Michael C. Hall. The Fisher clan also includes mother Ruth (Frances Conroy) and sister Claire (Lauren Ambrose). Other regulars include mortician and family friend Federico Diaz (Freddy Rodriguez), Nate's on-again, off-again girlfriend Brenda Chenowith (Rachel Griffiths), and David's on-again, off-again boyfriend Keith Charles (Mathew St. Patrick).

On one level, the show is a conventional family drama, dealing with such issues as relationships, infidelity, and religion. At the same time, it is a show distinguished by its unblinking focus on the topic of death, which it explores on multiple levels (personal, religious, and philosophical). Each episode begins with a death — anything from drowning or heart attack to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome — and that death usually sets the tone for each episode, allowing the characters to reflect on their current fortunes and misfortunes in a way that is illuminated by the death and its aftermath. The show also has a strong dosage of dark humor and surrealism running throughout.

A recurring plot device consists of a character having an imaginary conversation with the person who died at the beginning of the episode. Sometimes, the conversation is with other recurring dead characters, notably Nathaniel Fisher Sr. The show's creator Alan Ball states they represent the living character's internal dialogue by exposing it as an external conversation.

Although overall plots and characters were created by Alan Ball, there are conflicting reports on how the series was conceived. In one instance, Ball stated that he came up with the premise of the show after the deaths of his sister and father. However, in an interview, he intimates that HBO entertainment president Carolyn Strauss proposed the idea to him. In a copyright-infringement lawsuit, screenwriter Gwen O’Donnell asserted that she was the original source of the idea which later passed through Strauss to Ball; the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, proceeding on the assumption that this assertion was true, rejected her claim.

The show focuses on human mortality and the lives of those who deal with it on a daily basis. When discussing the concept of the show, creator Alan Ball elaborates on the foremost questions the show’s pilot targeted:

Who are these people who are funeral directors that we hire to face death for us? What does that do to their own lives - to grow up in a home where there are dead bodies in the basement, to be a child and walk in on your father with a body lying on a table opened up and him working on it? What does that do to you?

Six Feet Under introduces the Fisher family as the basis on which to answer these questions. Throughout its five-season, 63-episode run, major characters experience crises which are in direct relation to their environment and the grief they’ve experienced. Alan Ball again relates these experiences as well as the choice of the series’ title, to the persistent subtext of the program:

Six Feet Under refers not only to being buried as a dead body is buried, but to primal emotions and feelings running under the surface. And when one is surrounded by death it seems like to counterbalance that, there needs to be a certain intensity of experience, of needing to escape. It’s Nate with his sort of womanizing; it’s Claire and her experimenting with dangerous boys and dangerous drugs; and it’s Brenda’s whole sexual compulsiveness; it’s David having sex with a hooker in public; it’s Ruth having affair after affair; it’s the life force trying to push up through all of that suffering and grief and depression.


The wonderful HBO series by David Ball had a superb opening that I looked forward to each week while the series was on.

My favorite ending of a series. Claire leaves home. The ending is set to a very beautiful song "Breathe Me" by Sia.