Television: Where The Hearse Is

Six Feet Under checks out the skeletons in a mortuary clan's closets

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All this can lend itself to the kind of tired potshots against Wasp repressiveness that sometimes marred Beauty, with the open-casket funeral standing in for suburbia's houses made of ticky-tack. The show can be glib, and there are too many one-dimensional peripheral characters, like episode four's Latino gangbangers. But the leads are richly drawn and well cast; theater veteran Hall finds layers within layers in tightly wound David. In the pilot's finest scene, Nathaniel's funeral, Nate makes a self-indulgent show of refusing to sprinkle dirt on the grave from a tidy canister, protesting the "sanitized" ritual by hurling on fistfuls of dirt with his bare hands; Ruth follows suit, wailing like an animal. "You want to get your hands dirty?" David confronts his brother. "You sanctimonious prick. Talk to me when you've had to stuff formaldehyde-soaked cotton up your father's ass so he doesn't leak." If our society's ways of death, and life, are based on little white lies, we see here that in some way we've asked for that; if Ruth's eruption is honest and healthy, we also on some level hoped not to see it.

Which means too that the dead are more likely to speak (as they do here--Nathaniel appears in fantasy sequences throughout the season) than Six Feet Under is to become a Sopranos-scale phenomenon. It is often funny but never exactly fun; it's icier, more rarified and easier to admire than to love. It's also audacious, psychologically acute and beautifully shot (including TV's most gorgeous opening-credits sequence). And there's enough under its verdant green surface for Alan Ball to keep on digging.

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