Six Feet Under - Gestorben wird immer

This isn't so much a review as it is a reflection about how well this show has held up and what a joy it is to rewatch on Netflix. I'd previously seen the first four seasons on HBO in the early aughts, but I missed the fifth and final season. My husband has never seen it and it comes up enough in pop culture and is on many best-ever lists, so we slotted it in for one of our current dramas (we're also watching "3 Body Problem" and "True Blood", another one by Alan Ball).

We just finished S01 and I'm loving it all over again and agree with all the accolades the show has received over the years. After watching Lauren Ambrose as an adult in the recently concluded Apple TV+ series, "Servant", it's nice to be reminded how great an actress she's always been. With David's coming-out storyline in the first season, it's also a good reminder of what life was like in the early 2000s and how things have changed (though not all for the better, definitely). Everybody has probably watched this already, but if not, add it to your queue. It is well worth it.

Screenwriter Alan Ball is most well-known for his 1999 film debut American Beauty (directed by another first-timer, England's Sam Mendes). His first work was a stunning success, captivating audiences all over the world and winning five Academy Awards. In 2001, the pilot for Ball's first television series Six Feet Under aired. While being considerably darker than audiences might have expected, the series soon found its fan base and secured a place in the list of all time greats.

The show revolves around the Fishers, a rather isolated and dysfunctional family who run their own independent funeral home, and whose eldest son Nate (Peter Krause) is reunited with them in the wake of his father's untimely death. Once he is home, Nate learns that he has inherited the family business with his gay brother David (Michael C. Hall) and he has to learn how to again become a part of this bizarre family. Meanwhile, David, we learn, is struggling to reconcile his homosexuality with his home-taught Christian values, while his younger sister Claire (Lauren Ambrose) is forced to battle the hell of adolescence and the children's mother Ruth (Frances Conroy), a deeply devoted mother and wife, has to learn to face life without her husband. The complete first season sees the growth of the Fisher family as they slowly begin to disband their isolation and seek comfort, support and love from one another in the face of hardships and tragedy.

Six Feet Under is what every show should strive to be – it is intelligent, witty, sincere, realistic and completely unashamed to show the dark, painful side of life, without being depressing or nihilistic. It deals with an unfathomable amount of very significant issues, but on such a personal and relatable level that it doesn't even begin to feel preachy or self-important. It explores society's position on gays, women, young people, the elderly, the mentally ill and looks very openly at religion and death. A series of this standard is a surprise even from the production company that brought us Angels in America and The Sopranos.

One of the most fundamental principles for engaging an audience is to present engaging characters. Six Feet Under is a prime example: each character we're introduced to does take some getting used to, but all are wonderfully rich and complex and three-dimensional, balanced nicely by each other. Not only the Fishers but all their friends, acquaintances and lovers are well-developed, highly-involved and important to the show in its many layers. Nate's girlfriend Brenda (Rachael Griffiths) and her manic-depressive brother Billy (Jeremy Sisto), David's boyfriend Keith (Mathew St. Patrick) and the Fishers' Puerto Rican employee Rico (Freddy Rodriguez) are all fantastic characters that do far more than just complement the show's funeral home family.

Alan Ball is a truly gifted writer and an even more amazing artist; his ability to create such a delightfully unique environment and then to build on that environment to such incredible heights is nothing short of genius. His signature style of dark humor is one of the best things about Six Feet Under; even in a show about such somber and sometimes even morbid material, laughter is not uncommon, as he is able to recognize that there is more to life than pain. Ball has, within 2 short years, proved that he is one of Hollywood's most talented minds, and we can all look forward to further work from him.

More than any other television series in history, Six Feet Under is able to connect with its audience on a raw and emotional level that makes the sentimental soap operas of prime time television look like badly acted school plays. Joining the ranks of the most intelligent and heartfelt shows of today, it can rest assured that it will be remembered in the world of tomorrow as one of the most innovative and poignant shows of all time.

When using superlatives with this show it is totally fair. This show does something all other movies, shows, etc cannot do: it can safely apply any genre and still function as a deep and very entertaining show. As everybody episode goes by the show only becomes more addictive. It taps into almost every aspect of life. Every emotion is shown; love, hate, forgiveness, triumph and the list goes on and on. In fact this show depicts life the most realistically. The strangeness and peculiarity of the many themes perfectly displays the confusion in life and how it affects us. The show displays confusion in the clearest way making it almost impossible not to some how relate to the characters in the show. Not to mention also the series ends on one finest note you will ever see not just satisfying the viewer but taking the show to a level far and above anything else I have ever seen before. This show does the impossible twice over.

Six Feet Under is meticulous, beautiful, daunting, and powerful. One way or another, it will connect with you, perhaps in places you didn't expect and aren't willing to expose. At times wrenching, at other times cathartic, but always staring back at you knowingly, this show stands head and shoulders above the advertising-driven fare that clogs network TV with mediocrity, token minorities, and jarring commercial breaks. It changed the way I view television, and I recommend it to anyone who's tired of the same old crap.

After watching the series finale (which I won't spoil, don't worry), I sat in bed, unable to sleep. After poring over everything I'd seen over the past season, it struck me that SFU is the most raw and personal television show I've ever seen. Even more, there are no stand-alone episodes for easy syndication. Every single installment is part of a huge puzzle, or a few more miles on the Fisher family's road. I've always found Peter Krause to be a disappointingly flat performer, which is unfortunate because his character anchors the show, but the other actors are often transcendent. Regardless, every one of them radiates with a sometimes painfully familiar pathos. The cinematography is also staggering sometimes, taken from film rather than typical 3-camera TV work. If that's not enough, the music they choose to score the episodes is almost symbiotic; it seems ingrained into the film itself, even when you know it was just licensed.

This is not really a family-friendly show, though, encompassing profanity, nudity, violence, drug use, "alternative lifestyles" ... So in other words, it's just like real life. And despite the interpersonal conflicts that fuel the narrative to the point of melodrama, the show isn't afraid to pause every once in a while and let the show communicate without dialogue.

I feel very gratified to have watched SFU, and I've never felt that way about any other show in the almost-27 years I've been alive. Hopefully it will start a trend, if only on premium cable.

What a series. What a last season. What a finale!

I started watching it without knowing too much about it, I just knew from hearing about it a few years ago that it was one of those "Amazing HBO series" and that it was about a family owning a funeral home.

The actual "plot" is indeed about a family-owned funeral home in which the father of the family dies (this is at the very beginning of the first chapter, so I'm not spoiling anything), and the series follows the life of the rest of the family: The 3 sons (2 male of 30ish and the girl who is in the last year of school), the widow wife, and some supporting characters

If you ask me, the acting and the writing are everything in this show. Characters are complex, they evolve they don't always move forward - sometimes lessons need to be learned multiple times, as real people do. And each actor does an amazing job in portraying their character.

Each one has 2/3 major arcs throughout the show, so it is very interesting to see them navigate them.

Different topics are touched across the episodes, many of them very controversial, but the show portrays them in a very serious way. There's some dark humour though; after all it's about a funeral home where death comes with customers in every episode.

Definitely a must watch. And even though it is more than 20 years old, it has aged very well.