My husband Daniel and I just finished the entire Six-Feet-Under, HBO TV series last night. In the end the family plays out the overwhelming grief of mortal loss that an endless stream of clients, over the five-year series, had only hinted at in the comfort of the death clan’s solemn intake room.
When we are first introduced to this family of quirky misfits, all self imprisoned by societal strains, they are in this same grief stricken state over their father Nathaniel’s untimely death. At that moment in time, however, we have only just met them and our empathy is purely voyeuristic and abstract in nature. However, after all these many performances we have grown to know them intimately and have taken them into our hearts and minds as we so often do in our favorite TV affairs. This time, as the Fisher family stumbles their way through the consciousness altering experience of having a central family member die, we stagger too. Together we are tortured by anxiety, numbness and disbelief. The ceiling-eye vision of Claire curled up in an ocean of unmade sheets has been indelibly burned into my psyche.
In this way the familial cast spends most of the final episode groping through the clay of their existence. Remarkably in less than an hour they begin to emerge with Claire’s symbolic relocation to New York and independence. In the last remaining minutes of the show, the Fisher family is rolled out into the future in short order. Each member grows old and gray, under the expert hands of Hollywood’s most talented, fades and passes. All of the rest of their combined lives and deaths were dealt to us with the deftness of cards spinning in the hands of a seasoned gambler.
I can’t even begin to imagine what it must have taken to envision all of those scenarios and to bring together not only the creative vision but also the filmed reality. I am haunted by it in the same way that I have been haunted since childhood by the fluid passage of initial growth, to full bloom and inevitable decay of flowers captured on film. They showed this many times on their opening trailer, so much so that I had grown accustomed to something that in the past had always been so compelling to me. But to be confronted with the same time-lapse process of my own species; rising forward and crumbling into the sand was disturbing to say the least.
I find myself today running through the memories of this fictional tribe as if they were my own. I feel as though I have lived through at least seven reincarnated life times in a single breath. By the second season I began to feel as though “I”, the viewer, was God screening her creation. As I sat behind the window to their lives I experienced with them joy, sorrow, judgment and humility. I disliked characters, then felt compassion for them and then disliked them again. Watching this show has been an amazing experience.
The series finally of “Six Feet Under” is the best final episode I’ve ever seen. I miss the show, but I also felt it was time to say goodbye. The acting and writing were both superb — and Alison, your summary is just as amazing.
Great précis of the series. Very few series manage to wrap up in a satisfying way, but this did — and it kind of previewed the way JC Rowling decided to put the wrap on Harry P.