‘Make it more f***ed up’: The story of Six Feet Under, 20 years on

HBO’s pioneering funeral home drama was one of a kind when it debuted in June 2001. Louis Chilton speaks to creator Alan Ball, as well as writer-producers Rick Cleveland, Bruce Eric Kaplan and Kate Robin, about the making of TV’s death-obsessed masterpiece

Deathless: The Fisher family mourn the passing of a loved one in Six Feet Under’s very first episode (HBO)

Like most of us, television has always tended to shy away from death. Of course, it has featured on TV since the medium’s earliest days – as a storytelling device, a set-up for a mystery, a story twist or even a convenient means of explaining an actor’s departure. But for the better part of a century, TV skirted around the edges of death, avoiding the unknowable black hole at the heart of it. Perhaps the 20th century’s finest example was Twin Peaks, which shocked the world in 1990 with its raw, protracted look at the murder of a teenage girl, diving into a community’s grief without offering any easy or coherent answers. But in 2001, Six Feet Under blew all precedents away.

When it comes to exploring death on-screen, there has never been a better, funnier, more humanistic example than Six Feet Under, first broadcast 20 years ago today. Of all the conservative media taboos that Alan Ball’s pioneering TV drama would flout – and there were a lot of them, from meth-smoking schoolkids to gay threesomes to mass shootings – none was more challenging to the “feelgood” conventions of television than its candid, no-holds-barred treatment of death. Six Feet Under was a series that looked death square in the face, scrutinising every mole and crevice. “I feel like what the show is about is pretty timeless,” Ball tells me. “There had never really been a show like that, about that subject. About death.”

Winning nine Emmys and three Golden Globes over the course of its run, the show focused on the Fishers, a family of undertakers running the California funeral home Fisher & Sons, whose patriarch Nathaniel (Richard Jenkins) is killed in a shock car accident just minutes into the pilot. There’s Nate Jr (Peter Krause), the idealistic eldest son who left home at 18 and is reluctantly drawn back into the family business. There’s Ruth (Frances Conroy), Nathaniel’s widow, an eccentric and repressed woman who married young and undergoes a later-in-life sexual awakening. There’s David (Michael C Hall), the uptight and (at first) closeted middle sibling, who carries on his father’s work at the funeral home. And there’s Claire (Lauren Ambrose), the wild-child youngest daughter with ambitions to be an artist. Rounding out the series regulars were Brenda (Rachel Griffiths), Nate’s lover and troubled daughter of two psychiatrists, Federico (Freddy Rodriguez), the money-minded family man with a talent for restoring cadavers, and Keith (Mathew St Patrick), David’s lover, a cop with a temper.

Each episode opened with a death, in an ingenious spin on the classic Columbo-style formula. Here, the killer was more often than not simply misadventure, hubris, or wild bad luck. Some deaths were darkly comic – a baker is gruesomely diced while cleaning a dough mixer; a woman wanders into traffic, having mistaken the flight of some helium-filled sex dolls for the Rapture. Others were tragic – a young gay man is killed in a hate crime; a six-year-old boy mistakenly shoots himself with his father’s gun.

Episodes would loosely centre around these deaths, but Six Feet Under devoted plenty of time to its characters’ neuroses and personal dramas. Emotions were usually buried more assiduously than the corpses: one of the show’s magic realist flourishes saw characters routinely holding conversations with the dead, and even with the personification of death itself.

Ball came to the series after frustrating stints in network TV, on largely forgotten sitcoms Grace Under Fire, Cybill and Oh, Grow Up. A playwright with a knack for comedy, Ball had seen his stock shoot up with the joint critical and commercial success of 1999’s American Beauty, for which he wrote the screenplay. “All of a sudden I’d found people taking what I had to say in meetings seriously,” Ball says. “I guess I became a proven commodity.”

Six Feet Under’s premise grew from an idea given to him by HBO executive Carolyn Strauss. Along with series including The Sopranos (1999-2007), The Wire (2002-2008), and Deadwood (2004-2006), Six Feet Under was part of TV’s “Golden Age” revolution. No longer was TV drama simply to be gawked at, eaten in front of, and forgotten. All of a sudden, TV was being regarded as Art, as capable of metaphor and nuance as any other medium. And HBO was almost unilaterally behind this sea change. “That was where everybody wanted to be working,” says Ball. “Nothing even came close to HBO.

“For Six Feet Under, I had to unlearn what I had learnt working in network TV,” he adds, explaining that he had “learnt how to basically anticipate” the notes executives would give him (“usually ‘make everybody nicer’ and ‘articulate the subtext’”). “I don’t want to say that HBO didn’t have any creative input, because of course they did, but it was minimal. There weren’t that many people giving notes, and the notes that we got were good, smart ones.”

Alan Ball directing Peter Krause, while filming the pilot episode of ‘Six Feet Under’ (HBO/Ron Batzdorff)

When he turned in his first script to HBO, the only real note he received was to make it “more f***ed up”. Ball made some changes – including making Brenda, Griffith’s character, “more complicated, less of a ‘good girlfriend’”, and adding a scene in which Claire hangs out with her father at his own funeral. By the time the show went to air, being insufficiently f***ed up was not a claim anyone could make of it.

“I remember early in the first season there was a crib death,” says Ball. “And one of the writers was saying, ‘You can’t do that. You can’t go there. It’s too upsetting,’ and I’m like, well, we have to go there. We have to. Because these people who do this for a living, they have to go there. And we have to go there with them.”

Six Feet Under also arrived at a turning point for how TV creators were perceived. Showrunners such as Buffy’s Joss Whedon, Twin Peaks’ David Lynch and The West Wing’s Aaron Sorkin helped popularise the concept of TV as an auteur’s medium. (This would only intensify over the next two decades with the rise of the showrunner-star in series such as Girls, Louie, Atlanta, Master of None and Fleabag.) In 2001, with American Beauty’s screenwriting Oscar in hand, Ball fit the “prestige auteur” mould perfectly.

The show’s wonderfully idiosyncratic voice didn’t just come from Ball, but a whole team of writers. The writers’ room included West Wing alumnus Rick Cleveland and New Yorker cartoonist Bruce Eric Kaplan (who had previously worked with Ball on Cybill); later seasons would see writers including Joey Soloway (who went on to create Transparent) and Scott Buck come on board. By the end of season one, says Ball, writers were also serving as on-set producers for episodes they had written.

The wall of deathcare: A casket salesman (Eddie Jemison) chats to David Fisher (Michael C Hall) (HBO)

“Alan was particularly interested in playwrights,” says writer and producer Kate Robin, who joined after the first few episodes. “I think this was not only because he was a playwright himself, but also because he was looking for distinct voices.”

Robin says that for her, Six Feet Under was serendipitous. About a year after the death of her sister’s husband in a motorcycle crash, she “had the sudden realisation that I needed to think more and start writing about death”. The following day, she was told there was an opportunity to write for Alan Ball’s new show. “I read the pilot and immediately connected to the hilariously painful, angry tone with which Alan dramatised an emotionally dissociated family,” she says.

“I felt, as a playwright, that television was becoming more playwright-friendly,” says Rick Cleveland, another of the show’s core writers and producers. “Plays had been doing that mix of tones since Shakespeare – Hamlet, although a tragedy, has the very comic gravediggers in it.”

Ball’s sister, Mary Ann, was killed in a car accident when he was 13; he has described Six Feet Under as being about “the loss I’ve felt in my life... the grief I’ve felt over loss, the people I’ve lost.” But it wasn’t just Ball who incorporated elements of his own life into the series. “Everything that we were all going through personally somehow made it into the show,” Cleveland says to me. “Not just into the episodes that we wrote ourselves but every little idiosyncratic thing made it onto the canvas. A lot of us were seeing shrinks, and suffered from anxiety or depression... all of that stuff got funnelled into the show.”

Mealtimes are an endless source of comedy and drama for the Fishers (HBO)

Some of the deaths were drawn from real-life encounters; the passing of an elderly man while in the audience of a theatre was based on a real-life incident Kaplan had witnessed. “All the writers talked about their lives, their histories, things they saw and thought about all the time,” says Kaplan. “I had previously worked on Seinfeld, which was, oddly enough, similar. Both shows were about all our lives.”

From the off, Six Feet Under was a hit – not quite of Sopranos proportions, but “successful enough”, said Ball in a recent Entertainment Weekly retrospective. “It didn’t really get huge numbers but critics and people liked it. Once it started showing around the world, it really became somewhat of a phenomenon.” The Independent’s Thomas Sutcliffe gave the series a glowing review for its UK debut in 2002, arguing that Six Feet Under was “strongly reminiscent of American Beauty’s eerie tranquillity in dealing with mortal pain”. The Guardian, meanwhile, heralded the show as “better than The Sopranos”.

“We started to get invited as writers to give talks at funeral directors’ conventions around the United States,” Cleveland says. “We’d show a clip reel and then take questions from the audience. You’d be surprised how hard funeral directors party, when they’re at a convention. You wouldn’t think they'd be hard-partying, hard-drinking, philandering, but they are. Even the religious ones.”

Outside of the universally fantastic regulars, the show’s casting was a perennial strength. Memorable recurring guest stars included a pre-The Office Rainn Wilson, Kathy Bates (who also directed five episodes), Michelle Trachtenberg, Bobby Cannavale, Chris Messina, Catherine O’Hara, Mena Suvari, Ben Foster, Justin Theroux, and Patricia Clarkson, who won two Emmys for guest appearances on the show.

Patricia Clarkson (right) played Sarah, Ruth’s (Frances Conroy) hippy-ish sister (HBO)

Veteran actor James Cromwell joined the cast in series three, as Ruth’s suitor and later husband, George Sibley. The character starts out as a relatively genial if slightly insufferable retiree; a season or so later, we’ve learned he has six ex-wives, and he becomes hospitalised after a psychotic episode. When Cromwell signed on to the role, he wasn’t aware of the darker direction the character would take. “He did not like that,” says Ball. “I think he liked the fact that here was a guy, and he was a good guy, and he gets the girl, he gets Ruth. It was not comfortable for him to do that other stuff. It was difficult for James, but I personally feel like the work he did on the show is some of the best work he’s ever done.”

Cromwell wasn’t the only actor charged with wading into heavy subject matter. Whether it was Nate’s diagnosis with AVM (inspired by Ball’s cousin who underwent surgery for the brain condition), Brenda’s struggles with sex addiction or Claire’s relationship with troubled young hoodlum Gabe Dimas (Eric Balfour), plotlines often pushed actors to emotional and psychological extremes.

There’s no bigger example of this than the season four episode “That’s My Dog” (originally called “That’s My Cat”, until producers were told a feline would be too hard to wrangle). The episode, written by Scott Buck, is a shocking hour of TV in which David picks up a young, attractive hitchhiker, only for the stranger to rob him, take him captive, beat him, drug and essentially torture him, with the episode steadfastly refusing to cut away.

David (Michael C Hall) and his tormentor (Michael Weston) in the scandalising episode ‘That’s My Dog’ (HBO)

In a contemporaneous review, New York Magazine’s Emily Nussbaum compared it to Dr Melfi’s rape in The Sopranos, and described it as an “instant cocktail controversy, sparking debate for weeks”. Nicknamed “the departure episode” by director Alan Poul, the hour was harrowing; Hall’s performance as a trauma survivor over the subsequent arc was sensational.

“There were some concerns [among the writers] about brutalising David,” reveals Kate Robin, who wrote the episode’s powerful follow-up, “Terror Starts at Home”, “but I remember that I was very interested in exploring PTSD, which had not been dramatised much at the time. As I recall it, maybe wrongly, the PTSD aspect outweighed the violence. We were dealing with being a survivor and that felt meaningful.”

David’s pain was particularly hard to swallow because viewers had spent years watching him inch towards happiness and self-acceptance – coming out as gay over the course of season one, and navigating a rocky but loving relationship with Keith over subsequent seasons, with the pair eventually adopting two children. When it first aired, Six Feet Under’s depiction of a relationship between two queer men (one white, one black), devoid of stereotypes and fully three-dimensional, was not just rare, it was practically unheard of.

The ups and downs of Keith (Mathew St Patrick) and David’s (Michael C Hall) relationship was one of the show’s biggest storylines (HBO)

“Certainly, there had been things like that on television, but they were abridged and sanitised versions,” says Ball, a gay man himself. Cleveland describes David and Keith’s relationship as “a big step forward”. “We all had gay people in our families,” he adds. “My mother was gay, we all had gay siblings or friends... it just wasn't the issue that it still seemed to be on television. And I think Alan knew that... he wanted the show to pioneer that kind of storytelling.”

Other aspects of the show were also trailblazing. Freddy Rodriguez said of his character, Rico, in a recent discussion with Entertainment Weekly: “It was one of the first times you saw a normal Latin American family that didn’t embody any stereotype. We were hailed in our community as groundbreakers.”

At the beginning of season five, HBO went to Ball with the offer of two more seasons, which would have taken the total to seven. “Alan again, he did this really cool thing,” says Cleveland. “He brought it to the writers’ room and asked us how we felt. We all loved the show, and we all loved working together, but I think we all wanted to move on.”

“There was a general warm, good feeling on the last season,” says Kaplan. “It felt like there was a palpable appreciation of having this singular experience of working on this particular show.”

Lauren Ambrose and Alan Ball behind the scenes of season four (HBO)

What remained, then, was figuring out how to end it. The premise that would enter into the annals of all-time best TV finales – ending with a time-hopping flash-forward to see each of the characters at the point of their deaths – was, initially, one that divided the writer’s room (“one of our many epic and impassioned disagreements,” says Robin).

“I can’t baldly take credit for it,” laughs Cleveland. “But I can say that me, Scott Buck and Joey Soloway had this idea that we were going to kill everyone in a massive nuclear attack on Los Angeles, in the middle of a Thanksgiving dinner. We were getting tired of telling the same story. The breakup, the get-back-together, the breakup, the get-back-together. So the three of us came in one day and said, ‘Let's just kill everybody’. Alan kind of looked at us with his jaw dropped, and said, ‘God, that's a terrible idea. But what if we did kill everybody, but just showed everybody’s death in the future?’”

“When it was first pitched,” recalls Ball, “I didn't like the idea... it felt very nihilistic. But once I realised what we were talking about was being with each character at the moment of their death, I very quickly realised: that’s the perfect way to end this show. What other way is there?”

“This is something that happens in television,” says Cleveland. “Some people say there are no bad ideas. There are – but they sometimes lead you to a really brilliant idea.”

All that lives, lives forever: Nate (Peter Krause) and Claire (Lauren Ambrose) hang out after a tragic death (HBO)

Ball then had all the writers draw up a list of the characters, and describe how each person would choose to kill everyone. “And then he cherry-picked a death from every writer,” explains Cleveland. “So every writer killed someone in that season finale.” Cleveland’s own choice was Keith, who dies, “semi-heroically”, in a bank robbery shooting.

In the years since Six Feet Under went off air, many of its qualities have become far more widespread in TV – its sexual frankness and non-judgmental depictions of drug use, for instance. There is a little of Six Feet Under in the sibling quarrelling of Succession, in the cerebral spirituality of The Leftovers, in the sexual eccentricities of Casual. But there’s nothing quite like it around. “I think the show was stylistically very influential, from the tragicomic tone to the opening credit images, which have become standard, to the score and soundtrack,” says Robin. “But I desperately wish the show had led to other shows like it.

“It was so much more interesting than most other television in that it found what was epic and universal, hilarious and horrible in the small and large moments of our lives. All I’ve wanted in the years since is to create or work on a show that had this kind of scale, intimate and huge, but not a single network seems to have an interest in that anymore.”

“Within a year of the show ending,” says Cleveland, “I was wishing we had stuck with it for two more years. I’m not sure what stories we would have told. We had introduced small children into the cast, and to do them justice, we would have had to start building stories around those kids, and they were still probably too young to do that with. I have fantasies in my head about rebooting the show, but the stars are all the kids – they’re David and Keith’s two sons, and Federico’s two sons, and Nate and Brenda’s two daughters – they would all be in their twenties now, right? So you could build a whole new Fisher family drama around a new generation of people.”

There are, I’m sure, others out there who wish that Six Feet Under would be resurrected. But most have grieved, and moved on. Fortunately for viewers, there’s always the original, preserved not in formaldehyde but in streaming libraries and DVD box sets. More than a decade and a half on from its bittersweet demise, Six Feet Under remains one of TV’s definitive explorations of life and death. Rest in peace, and long may it live.