The use of surrealist fantasy scenes and dream sequences – Claire ripping her own leg off during a Flashdance routine, or Ruth shooting all of her ex-boyfriends dead, for example – gave the show an existential, psychedelic quality. The bus that rammed into the side of Nathanial Fisher's hearse – instantly killing the cigarette-smoking, crevice-skinned patriarch – in episode one announced a show that felt different.Īrriving as it did in the early summer of 2001, and running for five seasons, Six Feet Under provided an examination of day-to-day death in the post-9/11 US, in an era when the political and the personal were potently intertwined. In a masterstroke by the series creator, Alan Ball, the family business is a funeral home. Newly widowed Ruth, her three grown-up children, Nate, David and Claire – not to mention the much put-upon Federico – are left to run the family business. The series follows the Fisher family – vaguely conservative Californians prone to outbursts of intensely liberal activity – in the years after the death of husband and father Nathanial. But the TV show that has stayed with me for weeks, months, years afterwards? It's Six Feet Under. They represent not only a golden age of television, but the era of the small-screen anti-hero – and they all had me gripped, moved and galled. Drugs, organised crime, violence, more drugs. The greatest TV shows of the past 10 years – The Wire, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos – have all to a degree flipped the American dream on to its backside and exposed the societal mess that few want to acknowledge.
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