He chastised Nate and David for not reaching out to the Latino community for business, but he wasn't the Latino with a capital L character, he was just Federico, which meant he could be just as jacked-up as the rest of them. Rico (Freddy Rodriguez) was a Chicano with a Puerto Rican wife. David and Keith were an interracial, black-white couple who ended up adopting older black kids after debating whether Keith, an African American, should impregnate a white surrogate. That is, acknowledged as a fact of life but not harped on. Strong writing coupled with often-brilliant acting meant that this was a show that didn't hit too many false notes, even the times that it teetered on preposterousness. (Follow that?) And Brenda, while not a Fisher, had issues of her own: like the little sex addiction problem she developed the first time she and Nate got engaged.īall, who wrote the Oscar-winning 'American Beauty,' got the tones right, the little details of contemporary life, at the same time trafficking in the surreal, with a sudden song-and-dance routine that takes place in the character's head, or when Ruth, armed with a shotgun, abruptly starts firing at her former lovers as if they were ducks in a shooting gallery. Claire (Lauren Ambrose), the baby of the family, had a boyfriend who slept with their (male) teacher before she ended up sleeping with her crazy brother-in-law, Billy, played by the ferocious Jeremy Sisto. Hall), her son, a buttoned-up funeral director, was arrested for having sex with a male prostitute while at a mortician's convention in Vegas. ('I'm a whore!' she screamed in a melodramatic moment.) David (Michael C.

(After all, it's HBO.)Ībout the inappropriate sex: Ruth, the wonderfully repressed matriarch played to perfection by Frances Conroy, was having an affair when her husband died. And there would be lots of inappropriate sex. The dead would wander in and out of the action, serving as a sort of Greek chorus, often taunting the characters with their worst fears. That first episode set several precedents: Virtually every show would begin with a death. ended up haunting his family for the rest of the series.) (Peter Krause), who just happens to be getting busy with Brenda (Rachel Griffiths) - whom he just met on the flight from Seattle - in a janitor's closet. He was on his way to the airport to pick up prodigal son Nate Jr. No noble death for Pa Fisher: He's driving a hearse, trying to light a cig, when he's crushed by a bus. This was established in the very first episode, when its patriarch, Nathaniel Fisher Sr., (Richard Jenkins) meets his end. Working around death did not make the Fishers immune to the Grim Reaper knocking on their door. What made it so deliciously ironic was that the funeral home's inhabitants, the Fisher family, witnessed a parade of corpses through their Victorian mansion but were no more comfortable with death than you or I. After all, it was set in a funeral home, and death was. Sure, lots of television shows confront death week in, week out, but not many showed us talking dismembered corpses, hilariously inconvenient deaths and the joys of wound-filling cosmetic molding putty. When it debuted in the summer of 2001, 'Six Feet' had the shock factor, to be sure. For now we'll just say this: There's not likely to be a 'Six Feet Under' reunion. We'll get to deconstructing the 75-minute finale, which airs Sunday on HBO at 9 p.m., in a minute.

So let's call this a eulogy, an appreciation, if you will, of an Emmy-winning show that never ceased to make us squirm - did we need to see Brenda kiss her brother Billy only to find out it was all a dream? - at the same time it made us laugh out loud and cry real, choked-up tears. Dude! Get over it!)īut who were we kidding? With a show dedicated to all things funereal, which killed off lead characters without a moment's hesitation, it was just a matter of time before its creator, Alan Ball, would toss dirt on the face of his own creation. (When will David get some therapy over his crack-smoking-abduction episode. Okay, sometimes they acted a lot like us. It was rare to see a show that so deftly melded the merry with the macabre, where the dearly departed were just as obnoxious and opinionated in the afterlife, where the characters, both the living and the dead, acted a lot like folks we know. Aconfession: Deep down, we were wishing that 'Six Feet Under' would turn out to be immortal.

Six feet under nate death dream