Six Feet Under

a popular US television drama series about a family who run a funeral business. It was first shown on HBO in the US in 2001 and has been broadcast in many other countries. Each episode begins with a death which provides the focus for the events in the lives of the characters.

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▪ American television series

      highly praised American television drama that aired on the Home Box Office (HBO) network for five seasons (2001–05) and won numerous awards, including nine Emmy Awards and three Golden Globe Awards.

      Created by Alan Ball, who won an Academy Award for his screenplay for American Beauty (1999), Six Feet Under chronicled the Fisher family, who ran a funeral home in Los Angeles. The series began with the death of the family patriarch, Nathaniel Fisher (Richard Jenkins), which brought his prodigal eldest son, Nate (Peter Krause), home from Seattle. Grudgingly, Nate became a partner in the business and took his place in the family, which included his brother, David (Michael C. Hall), who hides his homosexuality from most of the world; his eccentric mother, Ruth (Frances Conroy); and his troubled, artistic teenaged sister, Claire (Lauren Ambrose). Also pivotal to the story were Nate's love interests: Lisa (Lili Taylor), his estranged girlfriend, who gave birth to Nate's daughter and became his wife, and Brenda (Rachel Griffiths), who struggled with her legacy as the childhood subject of a famous book by her psychologist parents and with a codependent relationship with her brilliant but disturbed brother, Billy (Jeremy Sisto). Likewise, David's partner, Keith (Mathew St. Patrick), a policeman, and Federico (Freddy Rodriquez), a mortician who worked for the Fishers and then became a partner, were crucial members of Six Feet Under's cast.

      Over the course of its run, the show offered one of the most complex and realistic television portrayals of the American family, in large part because of the ensemble cast and the team of writers who were unafraid to look death—and life—squarely in the eye. Nearly every episode began with a vignette of a person's death; generally, that body was cared for by the Fisher family and influenced the plot of that particular show. But while mortality provided a plot mechanism and while the show often focused on the ways the characters chose to live amid the constant presence of death (including the spectral presence of Nathaniel), more important was its honest exploration of family dynamics and human psychology. The show explored taboo and sensitive subjects with humour, sophistication, and sympathy and was not afraid to engage in hard-won sentiment.

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