10 TV Posters You Won't Believe
5. "Beauty To Die For" - Six Feet Under
HBO's Six Feet Under is one of the greatest drama series of all time, providing life-affirming insight into our collective fascination with mortality, yet always doing so with a blackly comic through-line.
And so in order to capture that same tonal essence, Channel 4 commissioned a series of mock posters for the show's second season, creating faux advertisements for fake products supposedly used by Fisher & Sons' Funeral Home.
In one poster, the corpse of a woman is pictured next to a tub of wound filler, and in another a man's dead body is used to shill for embalming fluid.
Though the ads were supposed to reflect the show's own satirical funeral home advertisements from its first season, the UK's Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) received 103 complaints from the public, who were distressed at seeing unwarranted images of dead bodies.
The ASA noted that the ads could be traumatic to the recently bereaved, and added that, "people were more likely to be confused and misled than amused by the advertisers' ironic approach." Nevertheless, Channel 4 responded by insisting the ads were "tasteful."
The fact that the posters in no way mention Six Feet Under itself might be the most baffling thing about them, to be honest.