2. It Made Us Take A Hard Look At Death
Six Feet Under was really the first of its kind. It was Alan Balls response to our culture of burying grief and pulling people behind a curtain at funerals when the smallest sign of emotion came through (The American funeral: Grief is bad, composure is good). Through the 63 episodes, we get to meditate on life and death in a way that no other show has been able to capture. Because the Fishers live and work at a funeral home, death was always present. Each episode began with a death that usually connected to the family or story line in some fashion (most of the time the funeral for the dead was held at their home). In a magical realism married with internal consciousness, we see the Fishers talk with the dead (Ball has stated that they are not ghosts, just the characters projecting internal struggles for us). At its best, the story line was connected so much deeper than that. Sometimes it was crystal clear, like Davids struggle to accept himself as a gay man while communicating (in his head) with a gay victim of a hate crime, serving as the devil on his shoulder, bloody and bruised, he told David how the world was against him. Sometimes, a bit more subtly, when Nate learns of a brain condition he has and mounts his frustration on a vision of the high school football player who died of heat exhaustion, Why the hell not you? he yells, alone in the basement, Did you think you were immune to this?