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When Six Feet Under premiered, we met the Fishers, a Pasadena, California family that owned a funeral home. The first episode, directed and written by Alan Ball, took place on Christmas Eve. Ruth (Frances Conroy), the mother, is having an adulteress affair with her hairdresser. Her youngest son, David (Michael C. Hall) is a closeted homosexual. David’s older brother Nate (Peter Krause) is reluctantly returning home for the holidays.

The Fisher’s teenaged daughter Claire (Lauren Ambrose) is a rebellious, drug taker with artistic aspirations. Fisher patriarch Nathaniel (Richard Jenkins) is Six Feet Under’s first Corpse of the Week. In Episode 1, he’s killed when a municipal bus broadsides his new hearse. Papa Fisher’s ghost confirms that in Ball’s series, the dead don’t rest in peace, they return to tell the living where they’re going wrong--how to get life right.

There is Brenda Chenowith (Rachel Griffiths), damaged goods to whom Nate is attracted en route to his parents’ home. They marry in Season Five. Rico Diaz (Freddy Rodriguez) is the gifted, young mortician who works for the Fishers, eventually becoming their partner.
From the artsy opening credits, Alan Ball’s vision was brilliant, complex, dark. Six Feet Under quickly claimed hit status, and Ball turned over many creative responsibilities to highly capable others.

Viewers came to love the inventive ways in which the Corpse(s) of the Week ended up at Fisher & Sons, later Fisher & Diaz, Funeral Home. In the earliest episodes, a pyramid schemer buys the farm in a swimming pool accident, a bakery owner is folded, spun, and mutilated into his own cookie batter, and a porno actress is electrocuted in her bath. In the third season opener, we are tricked temporarily into believing that Peter Krause’s Nate Fisher is the Corpse of the Week.

When Six Feet Under opened shop, David Fisher was secretly dating African-American cop Keith Charles (Mathew St. Patrick), thus giving American television its first gay interracial relationship. As the series, and the couple’s stormy, on again, off again relationship progressed, many gay subjects were explored through David and Keith’s storylines. In the series’ final season, the Fisher-Charles’ considered having their own children, then opted to foster parent two deeply troubled brothers.

For gay men, the single most important episode was Episode #12, A Private Life. The Corpse of the Week was Marcus Foster Jr., a gay UCLA grad student, fatally beaten in a hate crime reminiscent of Matthew Shepard. Marcus returns from his personal lavender beyond with cautionary words for closeted David Fisher about his sexual orientation--and the choices that he had made for his life. After serious introspection and much gnashing of teeth, David finally comes out to his mother.

Through the seasons, Claire also had her share of gay/lesbian story arcs. In Season Three, she’s impregnated by Russell Corwin (Ben Foster), her fellow art student and boyfriend. She opts for abortion after learning of Russell’s gay affair with their bisexual teacher.
The following season, Claire becomes friends with a lesbian photographer, and briefly falls into a relationship with her. But even a perfect setting and the beautiful Edie (Alan Ball’s American Beauty Mena Suvari) can’t compel Claire to play for both teams.

While never as sexually graphic as Queer as Folk, Six Feet Under had a dark, sharp edge, and a rebellious attitude all its own. It was often controversial and subversive.
Viewers, critics, and awards-givers always loved Alan Ball’s cryptic series. Six Feet Under has won Emmy, GLAAD, Golden Globe, Peabody, and SAG Awards, among others. Right now, the series is nominated for five Emmys.

On Sunday, August 7, the same night that the thumpa-thumpa died at QAF’s Babylon dance club, Peter Krause’s Nate Fisher died--this time, for real. Of course, his ghost returned to haunt his wife even before she left the burial site.

After 63 episodes, spread over five seasons, Six Feet Under will be laid to rest on August 21. The decision to end was made by an exhausted creative team wanting to exit on top, and not by declining ratings, or HBO.

Nonetheless, creator Alan Ball reportedly wept when he wrote the finale. With no current desire to be in the television series business anytime soon, Ball has been writing the screenplay for Alicia Arian’s Towelhead novel. He hopes to direct the film.

In song, pop lyricist Harold Arlen writes: “Don’t like good-byes, tears, or sighs.” We agree.
Nonetheless: Goodbye, Queer as Folk. Rest in peace, Six Feet Under.

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