12 Main Character Deaths That Killed Great TV Shows

7. Nate Fisher (Six Feet Under)

Episode Of Death: S05E09 - "Ecotone"

When your show's unofficial tagline is "Everything. Everyone. Everywhere. Ends.", you've got to expect a fair amount of collateral damage. That being said, we never imagined the show would go so far as to kill off its de facto protagonist.

Entering its final run of episodes, it makes sense that Six Feet Under would try to do something unexpected. When Nathaniel Fisher Sr. got creamed by a transit bus in the pilot episode, it began setting up its credentials as the greatest show to deal with the cultural effects of grief: the start of each episode would feature the death of whatever poor soul would end up on the slab of Fisher & Sons' Funeral Home. While the youngest brother, the closeted, up-tight David, went from self-loathing homosexual to a (mostly) happy family man over the course of five season run, Nate followed a less traditional character arc.

Manager of "the largest food co-op in Seattle", Nate fell into being a funeral director after his father's death, as he did with almost every other aspect of his life. A one-off hookup with a former childhood genius in an airport toilet led to a protracted affair and his first of two marriages; his diagnosis with a rare, likely fatal brain condition led to him confronting his fear of death.

Every character on the show followed something of a convoluted path, but none was wobblier than Nate's. As such, his unexpected death in hospital, recovering from a brain haemorrhage, as David dreamed beside him, especially given we were just three episodes from the show's end.

Nate's inclusion on this list may be a bit of a cheat - it was a valid, indeed inspired dramatic moment, arguably the next logical step for a show that confronted the taboo of how we meet our ends - but, even so, from the moment that heart monitor flat-lined, we knew the show was more or less over.