‘Six Feet Under’: The Oral History of HBO’s Beloved Landmark Series
This story was originally published August 20th, 2015.
It’s easy to imagine that, 15 years from now, television audiences will take for granted the existence of groundbreaking series like Orange Is the New Black and Transparent. But it’s impossible to look at the currently lush television landscape without acknowledging the debt that most popular shows owe to HBO at the turn of the new millennium.
While network television continued raking in the advertising dollars with surefire bets and lowest-common denominators, the premium cable channel was kickstarting its own quiet revolution, finding success in a variety of genres from pop-cultural phenomenons (Sex and the City) to the ground-zero of modern prestige dramas (The Sopranos). The “It’s Not TV” cable network realized a simple, but often overlooked, programming principle: unique voices make for unique television. And so they set their sights on American Beauty screenwriter Alan Ball, pitching him on the very basic idea of creating a “series set in a family-run funeral home.”
What the Oscar-winner came back with was Six Feet Under, a deeply nuanced meditation on life, death, and the ties that bind (and strangle) within the Fisher & Sons funeral home that could be painfully funny, gut-wrenchingly depressing (each episode began with a death), and surprisingly uplifting. And the who’s-who ensemble cast could not have been stronger: Peter Krause, Rachel Griffiths, Lauren Ambrose, Frances Conroy, Richard Jenkins, Freddy Rodríguez, and Michael C. Hall.
Related: Stream Six Feet Under on HBO Max
During its first season alone, the series earned a total of 23 Emmy nominations in 2002, including nine acting nods. It also won that year’s Golden Globe for Best Drama Series, plus a Peabody Award for “its unsettling yet powerfully humane explorations of life and death.” Far from being just a critical darling, audiences were coming along for the ride, too — its fanbase grew larger with each season.
In 2004, while averaging about 6.2 million viewers per week (beating out the most watched seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Wire), HBO made the announcement that Ball was ready to bury his creation, just as he had so many of its characters. Six Feet Under‘s fifth season would be its last.
While fans of the show immediately began mourning its imminent passing, there was one thing they weren’t counting on: its finale, one of the most finely executed hours of television and a fitting send-off for a series that found beauty in life’s most tragic moments. On the 10th anniversary of Six Feet Under‘s much-praised finale, we caught up with the show’s creator and cast for a long-overdue eulogy.