Six Feet Under

Last Friday I finally finished watching Six Feet Under. I never had HBO so I always had to wait for the DVDs to come out before I could watch them. As such I was always typically 6-12 months behind. Which was especially frustrating since, especially at the end, it seemed like everyone wanted to talk about it, and I had a hard time staying away from spoilers. In fact I did catch one major spoiler about the last season before I saw it, one that was probably the biggest event on the show's 5 year run.

But now that I'm done watching I can say unequivocally that I'm glad it's over. Not because it was a bad show, in fact it was at it's best some of the best television I've seen. No, I'm glad it's over because it was so damn depressing.

I had said the same thing to Brian the other day and he asked, "Even more depressing than Millenium?" The answer of which, a resounding "Yes." While Millenium was a depressing show, it was more so in the gloomy "Everything is terrible and poorly lit and there are lot's of killers and conspiracies out there" sort of way. Or a better example: Badmotorfinger is a great album, but it's also sort of depressing in it's gloominess. It's a heavy, yet at the end of the day inconsequential, sort of depressing. Whereas "Borderline" by Thin Lizzy is a lot less ponderous, and a hundred times more depressing. Because it's more personal.

It was the same with Six Feet Under. It is a very personal show. These are normal people that are being dealt with, and for the most part normal lives. OK, so some of the main characters often have conversations with either their dead father, or any number of corpses that come through the funeral home they work at, but this is not in a supernatural sense, but merely a visual television representation of the memories we carry of people, the voices in our heads as we imagine how conversations might go with people we know.

However, being a television show, especially one about normal people, there needs to be entertainment value. Even a show purportedly about nothing, like "Seinfeld", was obviously very entertaining, because it wasn't exaclt about nothing, merely the ridiculousness of every day situations.

Six Feet Under took another tack. While often very funny, it took the normal lives of its cast and just threw every bad thing it could at them. In fact, since the show revolved around a family who lived in and worked at a funeral home, every episode began with a death. A death of a minor, "extra" character, but in that sort of opening, you know the tone that's being set. Obviously then one of the main themes of the show was of death and loss being a part of life. And how we (or they) deal.

Depressing enough, right? But there's more.

Aside from feeling for these characters as they seemingly went from one bad sitatuion to another, there was the aspects of the characters themselves. Let me take a minute here for a second to make the following argument. I watch a fairly decent amount of TV. And a conclusion I've come to is that, for all the crap TV in general gets, (and rightfully so since it produces a lot of crap), when it's really good, television can probably be the most effective storytelling medium. Now, those case where I feel it's really good are few and far between, but my reasoning is this: with other mediums (novels, movies, etc.) there is a definite beginning and ending point. In a movie you only have 2 or so hours to be introduced to a set of characters and follow them through whatever the screenwriter and director has in store for them. In a novel you have usually a few hundred pages. In really good television, in this example Six Feet Under, you had five seasons. You have a lot more time to learn about these people. They go through more. There's more depth as you see them in situation after situation. (The only other medium that can really compare are serial comics, but in my recent re-reading of all my comics I've found the quality to be a lot less consistent for reasons I've yet to figure out. Probably just not as many good writers.)

And this leads to my second point. The fact that you do get to know these characters so well. And if a show is going to be successfull, especially one such as this, you need to identify with those characters. You have to care when something happens to them. The problem is, and this is speaking from a more personal viewpoint in how I view myself, is that all the main characters are deeply flawed. One one hand that's part of what makes them interesting, but on the other a lot of times when I was relating to someone on that show, it was often to a part of them that was not of their greater nature. I identified with them when they felt lost or alone. Adrift. I recognized similar traits when they acted wrong, and knowlngly wrong for that matter. In situations where I felt they made the wrong choice, I could visualize myself making that same choice.

That's not to say I see myself as some totally moral Quasimodo or anything, but simply that in this case, a television show can also be educational, illuminating things about yourself that you might never have thought about.

But for all that, if I haven't made it sound like a total suicide-fest waiting to happen, I'd highly reccomend some Six Feet Under to anyone.