Today, June 3 2021, is the 20th anniversary of the debut of SIX FEET UNDER, Alan Ball's magnum opus about a family of undertakers in Los Angeles. It's one of the foundations of HBO's Golden Age, along with THE WIRE, THE SOPRANOS and OZ.
It also boasts perhaps the greatest finale of any TV show ever. Which is not only to say that it's just a tremendous hour of television but that it's an hour that follows the premise of the show all the way through to its natural conclusion. That's ultimately what a finale is supposed to do--to build on not simply the story that has come before but the underlying idea of the show, the What Was This All About Anywway. And to do so in that magical way that feels in retrospect absolutely inevitable but also completely unexpected.
SIX FEET UNDER is a show about how death is coming for each of us. And, if you look to the pilot, more specifically it's a show about how death is coming not just for each of us in that general sense by which we really mean those people over there, poor things. No: that train is hurtling 1000 miles an hour toward the people we are close to, embodied in the show in the patriarch of the Fisher family, who dies in the pilot.
Standing as he does in the place of the center of the household, his death is a wake up call not only for his family but for us. It's Alan Ball right from the start saying Dear, have a bag packed and get that bucket list going because death is coming for YOU, and she don't take Not yet for an answer.
Over the course of the series this idea keeps coming back. While pretty much every episode has some stranger dying and then needing the services of the Fishers' funeral home, the series also involves Nate Jr. finding out at the end of the first season that he has a potentially fatal condition and then almost dying in season 3; his wife Lisa drowning; his brother David being kidnapped and almost murdered by a psychopath; his second wife/OTP (...I guess?) Brenda having a miscarriage the day before their wedding; and then him actually dying in the final episodes. Death is always in the background waiting for our characters.
And so, too, is the question of--in the words of Mary Oliver--"What it is you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" (The end lines of her poem "The Summer Day" are actually a perfect encapsulation of the series:
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
David Fisher starts out deeply in the closet. Nate is a romantic afraid of commitment. Claire is afraid to pursue her dreams. Mother Ruth has allowed her life to become just a vehicle to support and control all of the others. And all of them struggle to actually be honest with each other. (As a young gay man David's story was always empowering to me, but the most powerful moments of the show were actually the kitchen scenes where they swear and speak truth to each other, particularly in front of Ruth. Even now that kind of honesty and messiness challenges me and blows me away.)
So therein is the premise of the show: Everyone dies, rarely when or how they might expect, so what are you going to do?
In the final sequence of the finale, Ball brings all of these ideas to their natural conclusion. We watch every character that we've loved all these years of the show move through the rest of their lives and die (except for Billy, because he's just plain awful, and Vanessa, because Justina Machado is forever). Some die absurdly, some randomly, some poignantly, while in the present Claire drives cross country to chase her dream of being a photographer. It's funny and sad and the absolute highest form of the show's insight that we only have this one chance on this crazy, beautiful, fucked up planet so grab hold of every minute while you have it goddammit.
Here's the sequence in full.
And here's Alan Ball talking about it as it plays behind him.
It's been fifteen years since that finale aired and even in this form where the focus is on Ball and we can't even see the full shot or hear Sia singing I still cry watching it.
In part that's because the sequence has so much pathos and truth to it. But it's also because Ball grounded where he ended in where he began. He found his finale in his premise.
Death, the monster chasing us all, has become the means of liberation not only from our burdens but from terrible, ridiculous, crippling fears.
TOMORROW: ZAL BATMANGLIJ TRUSTS THEIR AUDIENCE
