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Tuesday, March 05, 2002 ( 3/05/2002 09:30:00 AM ) Bill S. “IT’S A YIN/YANG THING” - HBO’s Six Feet Under began its second season this weekend: caught the premiere Monday night and it’s definitely hooked me for this go-round. When Alan (American Beauty) Ball’s series started, it seemed too cold and mired in the structures of mainstream series writing to be as surprising as it wanted. But as the series has progressed, Ball and his writers have both opened up the characters and effectively messed with our expectations – to strong comic and dramatic purpose. The opening formula remains the same: each show starts with a death that will send the corpse to the family-run funeral home (Fisher & Sons) that is the center of the series; each death is treated as an opportunity to examine some aspect of the main characters’ lives – in some of the more memorable episodes, one of the Fishers will have extended conversations with their personal visions of the deceased. What could be an endlessly sentimental device in the wrong hands (think of the movie, Da) serves to effectively illuminate the series’ characters. Season Two’s opener contained one of the best uses of this dramatic device to date: following the news that he has an inoperable brain tumor, eldest son Nate (Peter Krause) has an ecstasy-induced dream/hallucination where he plays Chinese checkers with his dead father (the unflappable Richard Jenkins: a recurring vision for all of the show’s family members) and the personifications of Death and Life. Death is visualized as a balding middle-aged white guy; Life a super-sized black woman – before Nate can get into the game, the two start to screw on a chair, while Nate can only watch both appalled and awed. When he wakes, he immediately writes down his dream revelation, which turns out to be a line from the Bhagavid Gita. Disgusted when he hears that his thought was not original, Nate immediately crumples up the scrawled piece of paper containing it. Which is one of the things that makes this show so wonderfully confounding: working on the fringe of life, Six Feet Under’s characters regularly have the opportunity to face revelation. But mundane concerns keep getting in the way of their ability to do anything with what they’re offered. It’s not the only reason to love the show (each of the series’ regulars are such prickly and well-defined individuals that it seems unfair to single any of ‘em out - Ball and company have given each plenty of opportunities to show their stuff). But one day after my viewing of the season’s premiere, it’s this small slice of priceless cosmic comedy that most sticks with me. # | |
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