Close Menu. Starring Peter Krause , Michael C. Redeem a gift card or promotion code. By ordering or viewing, you agree to our Terms. Sold by Amazon.

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T he 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. Drugs, organised crime, violence, more drugs. Death, death, loads of death. 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. But the TV show that has stayed with me for weeks, months, years afterwards? It's Six Feet Under. 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. 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. In a masterstroke by the series creator, Alan Ball, the family business is a funeral home.
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This post originally ran in December We are rerunning it today in honor of the tenth anniversary of the Six Feet Under finale. I had always had an instinct that Nate [Peter Krause] would have to die, since his whole journey was coming to terms with his own mortality. Once we figured out how to have him die three episodes from the end, suddenly it all started to fall into place. We should jump ahead in time and see everybody at the moment of their death.
The series begins with the death of the family patriarch, Nathaniel Fisher Richard Jenkins , which brings his prodigal eldest son, Nate Peter Krause , home from Seattle. Grudgingly, Nate becomes a partner in the business and takes his place in the family, which includes 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. Over its course, the show offers 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. But while mortality provides a plot mechanism and while the show often focuses on the ways the characters choose to live amid the constant presence of death including the spectral presence of Nathaniel , more important is its honest exploration of family dynamics and human psychology.