Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For (3 page)

This tendency for innovative television to borrow from originality long ago established in cinema is also shown by
Twin Peaks
. That series – perhaps TV’s most daring piece until
Six Feet Under
– was a formal import to the small screen of a movie style established by its creator David Lynch in
Blue Velvet
and other films.

So what is most notable about
Six Feet Under
is not only that it is bold and original within the context of television schedules but also that it has no clear ancestry in any area of culture. Its only significant debt to cinema is that it was the success of Alan Ball’s script for Sam Mendes’s
American Beauty
which drove the first publicity for
Six Feet Under
. And, while there are possibly subtle nods to Evelyn Waugh’s
The Loved One
and Robert Louis Stevenson’s
The
Wrong Box
, no earlier undertaking on the subject of death had so combined data with satire, progressive politics with traditional domestic drama.

In 20 years as a television critic, I have only rarely felt myself pulled forward on the sofa by the absolute shock of the new:
Boys
from the Blackstuff, Blackadder, Inspector Morse, Twin Peaks, One Foot
in the Grave, Talking Heads, Cracker, The Office
and
Nip/Tuck
. But this feeling – that this programme has never happened before and cannot actually be happening now – has never affected me as strongly as while watching a press video of the pilot episode of
Six Feet Under
.

No previous series had ever dispensed so casually and callously

– in such a savagely choreographed accident – with someone who the close-focus grammar of the opening had established as a likely major character.

This pre-credits sequence of
SFU
– setting up the corpse that will drive the story – is a brilliant subversion of the established device in hospital dramas in which the opening scenes tease us with the illness or injury of the week. Yet, while it has become accepted for a patient to die at the end of
Casualty
in the UK or
E.R
. in the xix

READING
SIX FEET UNDER

US,
Six Feet Under
has the nerve to start with a cadaver every week

– and one despatched with malicious wit: broken into 50 pieces by an industrial dough mixer, or electrocuted when the cat kicks the heated rollers into the bath.

It was also immediately apparent in that pilot that Alan Ball was challenging not only mainstream television’s primary taboo –

death – but a significant secondary sensitivity – gay sex – and, as a further declaration of adult intent in television, an inter-racial relationship between two men.

This concentration on a community ill-served by television, however, was placed within a universally impressive range of characterisation. As essays in this book make clear, the female characters

– especially the matriarch Ruth and the adolescent Claire – are depicted with unusual psychological depth and narrative generosity.

By the time it became apparent that
Six Feet Under
included its own spoof ads (for embalming fluid and other restorative necessities) I was, as we were clearly led to believe the corpses probably weren’t, in heaven.

Also present from the beginning was a political resonance.

Whereas television’s previous dealings with the body had involved saintly pathologists, their remit often extended to take in detective work and psychic healing, the staff of the Fisher & Sons Funeral Home have a much more practical and cynical attitude to corpses.

Their only aim is to achieve a trick of light and likeness that will survive the visitation of the open casket. For them, that fashion-able piece of shrink-lingo, ‘closure’, refers only to the moment when the lid is closed and the body can begin its rot.

In this sense, the Fishers are spin doctors (professional siblings, in fact, of the cosmetic surgeons in
Nip/Tuck
). And the business, it’s made clear, is going ever deeper into deceit. The corporation which is attempting to take them over in season one is even sneakier with euphemism: what the Fishers call ‘the funeral business’ has become

‘the death care industry’. The process of ‘embalming’ is now to be called ‘preparation for visitation’. George Orwell, who first spotted spin, would have treasured these examples.

At this level,
Six Feet Under
can be seen as a more topical and pointed series about politics than
The West Wing
. While that show inhabits a fantasy about Washington, depicting a sexually continent, Nobel-Prize-winning president during the actual incumbencies of xx

READING
SIX FEET UNDER

the libidinous Clinton and the anti-intellectual Bush,
Six Feet Under
can be seen as a sardonic commentary on the dressing up and presentation which have become so central to American politics.

Since the Iraq War – and the decision by the Bush administration to prevent television coverage of the bodies of American soldiers being flown home –
SFU
’s focus on the presentation of death – and its insistence on keeping the body in shot – has taken on an even deeper meaning.

In discussing
Six Feet Under
, the essays collected here touch on a wider debate about how television should be discussed. As a civilian television critic, I am conscious of the linguistic gap between newspaper reviewing and academic consideration: we say ‘programmes’

they say ‘texts’, and so on.

This, however, is an inevitable result of television’s struggle to be taken seriously as a critical subject. In British newspapers (com-mendably less so in America), TV is the only artistic discipline in which it has been common for reviewers to be appointed with a mission to dislike the form. While theatre and movie critics are essentially enthusiasts whose love of the subject sometimes induces disappointment, a TV critic can survive, and may even be admired for, an instinctive suspicion of the medium.

If this tendency to patronise television exists in the popular media, then imagine how much worse it has been in academia. As the stereotypical don was reluctant to watch television, the resistance to it being studied was considerable. In applying the language of academic analysis, these pieces are claiming for TV an equality of consideration with books, films and plays.

My regret about the proper attention paid to television in the colleges is that writers sometimes have a tendency to validate the upstart medium by invoking an older, more respectable one. I am always disappointed to be told that a piece of TV is good because it looks like a Vermeer or could easily have been confused with a Scorsese movie.

This cultural twin-towning comes from a defensiveness about the subject under discussion, but it seems to me a pity; television should be considered, for better or worse, as television.

In the same way, I am suspicious of those who avoid these landmark series on TV, waiting until the complete season is released as a box of DVDs, then consuming them through a weekend. While xxi

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SIX FEET UNDER

this approach can be allowed with
24
(adding a time game of our own to the ones the series plays), it must generally be wrong. The point about television programmes is that – unlike theatre or cinema

– they live within a flow of other images: sports, commercials, wars.

This significantly affects both their conception and their reception.

Television should be watched – and written about – as television. As this book makes clear, the importance of
Six Feet Under
is not that it is like anything else, but that it isn’t.

© the authors

xxii

KIM

to die?’ ‘To make

AKASS

contemporary television

JANET

drama important,

McCABE

I guess.’

Dad died last year. Visiting the undertakers to arrange his funeral took me into a world with which I already have a morbid preoccupation. Off the high street, nestled between the local chip shop and solicitors, the funeral home invites its trade with a display of dusty pink plastic flowers and a jolly snap of a buxom lady in tweeds releasing doves.

Hands parting. Desiring spiritual transcendence. Seeing only disembodiment and dissolution.

‘Do you want him embalmed?’ enquired the funeral director (
Rico
draining bodily fluids from a cadaver – Dad, maybe
). Perhaps he sensed our unease. He changed tack. ‘The body begins to decompose immediately after death. If you want to see him …’ Mum stopped him. ‘He looked so ghastly at the end – so unlike himself – best not,’ she said. Cancer had taken him long before death did. I had sobbed his passing long before he shuffled off this mortal coil at 5.10 a.m. that Tuesday morning.

Perusing a catalogue of hearses and selecting a suitable coffin to take Dad to his final resting place –
the fake infomercials for
cosmetic putty and deluxe caskets which punctuate the pilot of Six Feet
Under
– returned me to safe consumer territory. It all seemed so eerily normal and mundane. Maybe I was just numb: orphanage masquerading as civilised restraint – that stiff-upper-lipped superego.

Reaching into popular culture, as a means of understanding an 1

READING
SIX FEET UNDER

experience I found so utterly incomprehensible and emotionally unbearable, was the best I could do.

Thomas Lynch: ‘A death in the family is not a retail event. It is an existential one’ (2000: 164).

So, there I was: Sunday evening, sitting at the kitchen table with my husband, reminiscing over our first meeting. We were laughing, gagging for breath at the thought of ourselves as two 15-year-olds scarily fucked up and attracted to our differences. We wandered off in opposite directions but, some 15 years later, met up again, and now 15 years together have made our own family. It was much later, lying in bed that night, that it occurred to me. I had been watching ‘Life’s Too Short’ (1:9), where Ruth mistakenly takes Ecstasy, goes midnight wandering and asks her dead husband:

‘What happened to us? We were so in love. Where did it go?’ And here lies the rub. It is no small coincidence that it is not death that is now my big taboo – it is life, that liminal space between birth and the hereafter; it is what will happen to me when my children leave home and my husband and I look at each other, maybe as strangers, and wonder: ‘What happened to us? We were so in love. Where did it go?’

We mention our experiences precisely because in a society like ours, so able to articulate empowering experiences (like finding romance, making love work, managing our careers and money, giving parental and marital guidance) and define who we are, talking about ageing, dying and death pushes us to the limits of our ability to articulate experience. The enigma of death and the packaging of its aftermath, getting older and pondering the passing of time, present us with skewed perspectives undercutting all certainties.
Six Feet Under
is no exception. It divided critics and proved difficult to classify with hard-to-pin-down pleasures, as TV critic, Linda Stasi, found: ‘I don’t even know what I’m watching, let alone why. I mean who wants to watch a dramatic show about a dysfunctional family of undertakers?’

(2001). On one level
Six Feet Under
fits easily into HBO’s agenda of challenging conventional television wisdom and representing that which has rarely before been seen on our screens. But even so. It is a show pushing HBO to its limits. It exposes the workings of liminality on many levels: it is difficult to place in institutional and generic terms; it walks a fine line between comedy and tragedy; it teeters on the edge of unbearable poignancy before tipping over into 2

INTRODUCT ION

corny melodrama. Structurally it deals with the liminal space between death and burial; thematically it focuses on cultural taboos – homosexuality, mental illness, old age, sickness, drug addiction, adolescence, race and class – which, in turn, are used to revisit traditional cultural certainties such as religion, marriage and the family – and it questions who we are.