SIX FEET UNDER

Allan Ball's Six Feet Under lasted five seasons on HBO. The earlier seasons have inspired moments, though Ball can be too-clever-by-half. (I have a feeling that American Beauty, which he wrote, will date badly.) But the last two seasons were pretty well a disaster. "Jump the shark" is too mild: at the start of the fourth season the show rocketed into the outer void!

In case you aren't in the sophisticated set, Six Feet Under was a drama about the Fishers, a white Catholic family who ran a Los Angeles funeral home. (I'd have imagined them as Episcopalians, but that's just me.) There was Nate, the rootless Generation X brother who ran away to Seattle until he inherited half the business, involved with masseuse Brenda; David the inferiority-complex gay brother, involved with black cop Keith; Claire, the bratty teenage sister who wanted to become an artist; Rico, the Hispanic employee with ambitions of running his own funeral home; mother Ruth; and a host of quirky characters like Brenda's mentally unbalanced brother Billy. The running theme was pretty existential.

Each show would start with a death of someone who'd then receive a Fisher funeral. (There were lots of freakish deaths involving mutilated bodies or people dying alone whose bodies weren't found for days or for years.) The first episode's death was of father Nathaniel, whose hearse got hit by a bus when he lit a cigarette at the wheel, and his ghost kept reappearing for conversations with son Nate. Similarly, the later dead would talk to David. There were lots of surreal scenes and stuff like Claire doing an amorous musical number after going all the way with her boyfriend, but then he blabbed about her sucking his toes, starting humiliating gossip, so she stole a foot from a body that had been cut to pieces in a giant bread machine and put it in his locker to get even. (Rico replaced the foot with a leg of lamb.) When Ruth found out, her first reaction was "My daughter's having sex?"

Did I mention that it could be too clever by half? There was the time when Nate had a brain tumour or something which would require dangerous surgery, and he didn't tell Brenda, who only found out when he was in the hospital. The bottom line is that keeping secrets for an unreasonably long time is dramatically convenient, an old cliche. (Like, say, James Cagney as Lon Chaney Sr. in Man of a Thousand Faces, who didn't tell his girlfriend that his parents were deaf until she arrived at their home and had a nice dramatic shock.) This sort of thing may happen in real life, but only in California...

Yet the first three seasons weren't bad. The last two, on the other hand... It was painfully obvious that they were running out of ideas when they made Keith into a celebrity bodyguard. By this time, Alan Ball's idea of something original was to have Ruth's new husband receive in the mail from his estranged daughter a package of turds. Those musical numbers and surreal scenes came to seem old.

Claire became particularly annoying, an unappetizing combination of ruthlessness and self-pity. When she almost became involved with lesbian Mena Suvari, Ball was playing that same tease game from American Beauty: he cast the same actress, for crying out loud! And as for the brilliant creative "idea" that got her a gallery show... Let's just say that if I'd been Russell, her hated ex from whom she swiped this ugly concept, I would not have demanded that she admit her debt to me; I'd have paid her good money to keep my name out of it!

I also have a feeling that Six Feet Under will date badly...