RAISING THE DEAD
Creator recalls ‘Six Feet Under’ 20 years on
“Six Feet Under” has been dead nearly 16 years, but its legacy lives on.
Alan Ball, who created and was executive producer and director of the HBO hit, has been reminiscing about the Emmy-winning series ahead of its 20th anniversary and cast reunion at this month’s PaleyFest.
The series, which aired from June 2001 to August 2005, dug deep into the Los Angeles-based Fishers, who regularly faced mortality, living above and running a funeral home.
“I remember hearing that [real-life undertakers] were for the most part pleased that they were being presented as human beings who had lives and were flesh and blood and weren’t like creepy caricatures,” the Oscar-winning “American Beauty” scribe, 63, told the Daily News.
When Ball’s own mother died, a man from the funeral home involved even told Ball: “It’s because of you that I’m working in this profession.”
“I said, ‘Is that a good thing?’ ” the Golden Globe winner laughed. “And he said, ‘Oh yes. Oh yes, it is. I love it.’ ”
The ensemble show, which can be streamed on various platforms, starred Peter Krause as the “prodigal son”; commitment-shy Nate Fisher, a pre-“Dexter” Michael C. Hall as his conservative and initially closeted brother David; and Lauren Ambrose as younger sister and aspiring artist Claire. Frances Conroy played the seemingly reserved matriarch Ruth, who tries giving her leftover love to a series of zany men while her kids largely shut her out.
HBO had approached Ball to write about a family-run funeral home and, after his ABC sitcom “Oh, Grow Up” fell through, he wrote a pilot that he was later asked to make “a little bit more f---ed up.”
“When I wrote the pilot, I just tried to open as many doors as possible. I didn’t have anything mapped out,” said Ball
— including Nate’s tumultuous relationship with Brenda (Rachel Griffiths).
Ball, who recently wrote and directed the 2020 movie “Uncle Frank,” recalled that HBO was not sure how to market a “dark” show like “Six Feet Under.”
“They had said the same thing about ‘American Beauty,’ ” he said of the Best Picture-winning film. “I remember thinking, ‘Is it really?’ ... It just seemed to me like flawed people trying to make the best of their situation. But I never thought it would become what it became.”
To Ball, the show is “about living with the presence of death,” which means “accepting that death will happen” to everybody.
Death, as a result, opens every episode — save for the much-celebrated finale.
“After the first season, it became obvious … the first person you see, they’re gonna die. So we started trying to mix it up a little bit, so maybe the first person you see walks by somebody who actually [dies],” Ball said.
But the finale’s sprawling conclusion is probably the show’s most memorable approach to mortality, as it glimpsed into the Fishers’ futures, showcasing their milestones and deaths.
When a writer suggested, “We should just kill everybody,” Ball at first brushed it off but then thought, “How else can you end the show?”