 Six Feet Under is such an amazing series. It ebbs and flows from episode to episode, some episodes are only good while others are mindblowing. But it's breadth of the thing that really blows me away...how someone took the care to draw out this family portrait in such detail, and it just keeps expanding inward and outward, becoming more paradoxical and complex as it goes along. (Most people seem to be at least kind of aware of this HBO series, which went from around 2002 to 2004...but I am a complete pop culture luddite so it went blew right past me. I am into watching the third season now, at about two or three episodes a week.) Anyway in case you are also a pop moron and don't know, Six Feet Under is an American HBO TV series based around a family who are proprietors of a small independent funeral home in L.A. Which is an odd enough premise, but nothing new. What's new is that the series is truly about DEATH. Which is to say it's also all about life, about the big enchilada -- which is a magnificently courageous idea. The funeral home isn't just a plot device like in The Addams Family, it's for real. It's beauiful and epic in the most epic sense of the word. What pins it all together is the writing, the characters are so real it hurts. It really hurts, sometimes I see something in one of those interwoven characters that is me, so much me that i feel nauseous. I see some of my own highest aspirations and neuroses and dreams and deepest fears (what? in a show about death?!) reflected so sharply in these characters, and in the actors' embodiment of them. And it's so funny! SO funny, you would not believe. The best episodes are the ones written by Allan Ball, who created the series. Who also wrote American Beauty. He's a sharp guy, and there's that deep deep humanity, where every character is as convoluted as a real human being, and each one is utterly respected at their best and at their worst. And then there's the music!...la Traviata, Steppenwolf... Anyway I'm coming out of the closet on this. I am deeply engrossed. |
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