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Six Feet Under
2001 · TV series · 5 seasons
Created by Alan Ball
When death is your business, what is your life? For the Fisher family, the world outside of their family-owned funeral home continues to be at least as challenging as—and far less predictable than—the one inside.
14 positive3 negative9 neutralfrom 26 commenters
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28 comments on Hacker News
Seasons 3 and 4 did a really good job of capturing what it was like being in the industry and in SFBA in the mid/late 1990s, better than anything I've seen. I worked at McAfee (then NETA) at the time and the MCAF-ish stuff was uncanny; the last gasp of cubicle culture in the software product industry.
I liked the storytelling in it, but, like I said earlier, it's pretty Six Feet Under-ish, in that as it progresses it is less and less about the original concept of the show and more about the relationships between characters built up over years of episodes. Whether that's a good or bad thing for you depends in part on how much fan service you want; it's why I find Mr. Robot completely unwatchable.
Sad news. HBO has a veritable treasure trove of TV shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, Six Feet Under, Silicon Valley etc. Even their more recent ones like White Lotus, How to With John Wilson are leagues above Netflix. Only HBO can bet on artists’ vision like that.
I cancelled my Netflix subscription 7 years ago, 99% of their content is algorithmic drivel. Mindhunter, Dahmer, House of Cards were something I liked but nothing beyond that. I knew they were trash once I saw the sheer number of spinoffs they have just on Pablo Escobar. They had had one decent run of Narcos but then they just tried to extract every drop of juice out of that one persona. Most of Netflix dramas are just the equivalent of abhorrent and ugly graffiti. Their shows are Exhibit A in what happens if you give into algorithmic drivel and have no human touch to curate them.
HBO has some timeless TV classics that I keep rewatching every year even though I have watched them multiple times. Netflix can’t produce TV dramas like that, ain’t in their blood. Completely different DNAs.
Netflix does deserve all the plaudits wrt to their streaming experience though.
I'm just keying off this thing you wrote:
For example, the suicide was very poorly handled. It was used as vehicle for discussing open source vs proprietary code. But you could have easily done that without the death [...]
It's totally fine if we're not making any productive progress in this part of the thread. It's art, it's all subjective, we can just disagree. I think the interpersonal dramas in HACF are as earned as they are in any series; certainly, I'd put every season of HACF several notches above Six Feet Under Season 4 and its Scooby-Doo finale.
At the same time, I don't think there's any kind of important broader theme or message or ideas in HACF; the A-tier of prestige dramas have that --- The Wire, Mad Men, Better Call Saul. Mad Men and The Americans are I think the best comparands; both period shows with high-concept settings, both bigger idea/theme shows than HACF.
Try this: look up the most highly rated episodes on IMDB and watch only those. Missing the crummy episodes usually does not interfere with understanding the story arc. Often, I set a minimum IMDB score that I will watch, like 8.5 or 9.0 to capture only the best. This works well with series that:
- take a year or two to find their footing or
- have a large cast (some mediocre) that get their own story lines of no consequence occasionally or
- introduce cast members that don't make it or
- implode towards the final season.
I have done this for many series that are somewhat uneven:
- The Americans
- How I Met Your Mother
- Fringe
- Orphan Black
- Halt and Catch Fire
- House of Cards (watching the ratings allows you to miss all of season 6)
- Arrested Development
- Bojack Horseman
- Veep
- 30 Rock
- Jane the Virgin
- Black Mirror
- The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
- Suits
- Six Feet Under
- La Femme Nikita
- The Blacklist
- Peaky Blinders
- The Romanoffs
- Ozark
- Westworld (sometimes dropping episodes does not matter)
- Succession
- Borgen
And all of these series have lots of strong episodes.
Series I would not do this with:
- The Bear
- Breaking Bad
- Money Heist
- The Serpent
- Fleabag
- Chernobyl
- The White Lotus
Recently someone gave me this book called "Difficult Men" by Brett Martin. Nope wasnt about mass shootings. It was about the protagonists created in the most popular TV shows in the US and the minds of the writers behind them. So Sopranos, Mad Men, Dexter, Breaking Bad, The Wire, Deadwood, Six Feet Under etc etc. Its a super impressive and ever expanding list of writing. But the common thread is dysfunction. They are all coping badly with whatever situation they are thrown into or run into. And the costs and consequences keep building up and nothing ends too happily.
While reading it I was feeling, this too is a sort of mass attack on the minds of people. Cause its a hope and faith killer. The message is always - here is some entertaining and mesmerizing hypocrisy your small chimp brain hasn't imagined and guess what? Whatever move you make you loose. After reading that book, I see that same message in stand up comedy, in the news media, in tech and business news etc. Probably exacerbated since social media finds and amplifies such things. But I feel the messaging and signaling underneath really needs to be different.
> I'm astounded that this article doesn't mention what to me seems like a no-brainer: We're in the golden age of television.
I disagree, the golden age of television was the late 90s to early 2010s, from the start of the Sopranos, to the last episode of Breaking Bad. I can’t name a series in the last 10 years that is on par with Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Deadwood, or The Wire.
Streaming services killed quality television, House of Cards was the beginning of the end.
I recommend you watch Six Feet Under
> sponsored the de-stigmatization, normalization, and legalization of homosexuality in the United States over the past 30-50 years
Well, I wonder how to quantify all the "normalization" of homosexuality in tv shows/movies over the last 20 years or so (guesstimate) for example. Surely tv shows like Six feet under and culminating in Modern Family had a role to play though I wouldn't know how to put a dollar figure to it.
In the TV show Six Feet Under one of the couples found happiness when they realized they shouldn't live together but they were happy to date each other and see each other regularly, just not all the time, because the boyfriend went through cycles when he enjoyed socializing and cycles when he wanted to be alone.
That strikes me as fine if both people are happy with the arrangement, but if kids are in the picture or one of the partners is unhappy with this arrangement I don't know if it will work.
One thing is when The Wire and The Sopranos originally aired it was weekly and if there were any hanging plot threads the viewers would just have to stew in their own theories about what ifs, I remember lots of times wondering about the fate of characters and waiting weeks or years (Drea while the FBI was using her or that Russian in Jersey Pine Barrens? or who was the serial killer? in the projects in The Wire) for resolution and this was prior to when websites covered shows or when I was aware of internet groups/discussions dedicated to the shows, also on Sunday night before the Sopranos was Sex and the City and also airing on HBO was Six Feet Under (I think after The Sopranos when both were live) - so even just consuming one episode a week of these shows was compelling at the time to me for a weeks worth of scheduled TV viewing.
For viewings. If the viewing isn't done in the 24h post-death, the body has decayed noticibly: it's unsightly and smells bad.
(take with a grain of salt, my only source is 10 episodes of Six Feet Under)
Of all the shows you mentioned the only ones I have watched is, OITB (left it at after watching S04 I think), Master of None (both the seasons), I realise that its a drama that leans toward being a rom-com but I do not watch rom-coms at all. Kudos to Mindhunter, indeed that was entertaining and right in my ballpark. Liked House of cards till the time Spacey was there, S06 disappointed me. Season 1 of Making a Murderer was outstanding, season 2 didn't catch my interest. Also the last comedy I watched end-to-end I think was Entourage (which was produced by HBO), The Office (US) and Parks And Recreation, not surprisingly Netflix doesn't stream any of these in my region, Prime Video does the last two and Hotstar streams Entourage.
These are good shows not great ones like The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men, BB, Six Feet Under you know about the stuff that critics rave about etc. I don't care if Birdbox was watched by all of Netflix's subscribers, thats precisely the sort of thing that I don't watch the majority of the time, you watch that thing once and you forget that you ever watched it again. I'm now on probably my sixth or seventh rewatch of The Wire, that should tell you something about my viewing habits and why Netflix's content just doesn't work for me. I don't expect a network to consistenly churn out shows like that but at least some of the shows should be somewhere close to that level which HBO continues to do with The Deuce, Succession, True Detective(I know they fucked the dog on S02) etc.
Also you have the time to watch ALL of that, I don't. I work in tech too, I have an hour on weekdays and maybe 2-3 on weekends for leisure, so its only natural that I would be picky about what I watch, the absolute best, currently that would mean shows like The Americans, Escape from Dannemora and shows from the past like Halt and Catch Fire(from AMC), Six feet under, Deadwood which not surpisingly were also made by HBO. Netflix doesn't stream any of that.
I also don't understand how you think AMC won't exist, are they going to be insolvent ? Doesn't look like it, they have a cash-cow in The Walking Dead(I only watched till S06 then got bored) They got two of the best TV shows I liked BB and BCS, BCS is gonna kill it in the next season. They also produced The Terror, a brilliant mini-series which Netflix didn't stream as well and again Prime Video did. As a viewer I don't care about Netflix's subscriber numbers or HBO's lack thereof, I want to watch content I like which sadly Netflix doesn't produce on a consistent basis, this is entirely subjective and I realise that I might be one of the edge-cases in all the millenials when I say Netflix don't tickly my fancy.
I'm not biased towards HBO, hell HBO doesn't even stream in my country, I'm incredibly picky about what I watch since I'm short on time, Netflix churns out a LOT of shows, its only natural that some of them turn out to be brilliant and some of them indeed are, but the rest, like 90% of the shows are just average, they don't work for me, I simply do not have the time to watch them.
In that sense, Netflix is like the Y-Combinator of producing original content. You produce(invest in) hundreds of TV shows(startups) and hope one of them makes it big (becomes a unicorn) and the rest of them, well they would be probably cease to exist after some time.
Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Under, Sex And the City and The Wire are currently "free" in Amazon Prime.
At some point those licenses will expire but this illustrates the "innovator's dilemma" as applied to HBO.
They have a good business of selling cable subscriptions for new stuff, licensing their past shows to Amazon, Hulu and other willing buyers and selling on-demand access via Apple, Amazon etc.
Now they need to compete with Netlifx, which has a large catalog of licensed, popular shows from all over and their own exclusive content.
To compete with that HBO would have to drop revenue from licensing (there's less reasons to pay for HBO if I can get a lot of their good stuff elsewhere)
Their cable subscriptions are probably going to decline no matter what. Cable subscriber count is on a steady, 6 year decline (http://www.businessinsider.com/cable-tv-subscriber-losses-q2-chart-2017-6) despite being propped by internet + cable bundles.
That decline is accelerating i.e. every year more people are cancelling cable as a percentage. If that continues, it'll be a bloodbath. If the decline stops accelerating, it'll still be bloodbath, just later. I don't see a scenario in which cable starts growing again.
Netlifx model is easy to explain but almost impossible to replicate.
The model is: get so many subscribers from all over the world paying you relatively small amount that you'll be able to outspend any other company in quantity of TV/movie exclusive content, thus making it even more likely to get new subscribers.
This is "rich get richer" model and Netflix is already the richest.
People will be willing to buy 2-3 such subscriptions so that's how many winning slots there are.
So HBO better fight hard for that 2nd or 3rd position, but unfortunately just like BlockBuster or Borders had a good business until they didn't, HBO might not do enough to compete.
All excited for a rare scholarly article on soil structure and it turns out to be an episode of six feet under. Sigh.
I'm a bit surprised by that comment. I actually find Prime to have pretty good content and typically better movies than Netflix (who's movie library has been shrinking pretty drastically over the years).
If you haven't already watched it, I'd highly recommend Season 1 and 2 of "The Expanse" on Prime. There are a lot of pretty great shows on there as long as you don't rely on DC/Marvel shows for all your entertainment. Other shows that are reasonably acclaimed are:
- The Man in the High Castle
- Avatar: The Last Airbender
- The Nightmanager
- Mr. Robot
- Boardwalk Empire
- Downton Abbey
- Sneaky Pete
- Orphan Black
- Dr. Who
- Veep
- The Good Wife
- Transparent
- Hannibal
- Deadwood
- Curb your Enthusiasm
- The Wire
- Six Feet Under
- The Sopranos
GoT intro is actually an establishing shot, showing you which regions are featured in the episode. It varies per episode. It is a bit long, but not compared to the previous generation, and it has a lot of fast moving detail that takes many viewings to see it all. Six Feet Under (2001-2006), also by HBO, intro is over 90seconds and the same every episode, and it's very slow and low-detail.
Sure. I cry at movies and shows pretty often, too. (The finale of "Six Feet Under"? OMFG.) But that presumes those tears aren't somehow subtly different from personal grief tears.
I really doubt they are, but if we're going to ask the question, it behooves us to get the most accurate answer possible.
This sounds suspiciously like a certain episode of the HBO show Six Feet Under:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0701990/
Yes, and I can assure you that you are in safe hands. Six Feet Under has one of the most satisfying endings to a TV series I've ever seen. You may cry (manly tears) but you will not be disappointed.
> making it easier for people to discover Six Feet Under is a great thing.
Well, the first few episodes at least. The show starts out awesome and gets progressively more depressing with no payoff episode after episode.
By the end I was watching out of sheer stubbornness.
Oh my, I could spend hours with this!
'Sopranos' has the same 'Season 4' problem as 'Shield':
http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com/tt0141842
The massive drop in Twin Peaks after the murderer is revealed:
http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com/tt0098936
The awful last season of 'Dexter':
http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com/tt0773262
And that's how you do a last season (Six feet under):
http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com/tt0248654
I was glancing down through the comments and caught the whole first sentence before processing the breakingbadspoiler tag. Might want to change it completely..or just remove it. Is the show still worth watching knowing what I saw? I had Six Feet Under spoiled for me in a similar manner :-(
Only to a limited degree. Yes, there were soaps and other serials that had long-running narrative arcs, but not with the kind of sophistication contemporary writers are using.
Let's call it the 'Post-Buffy' school of thought, where character nuance, motivation, back-story, plot and sub-plot are all delivered with a kind of attention to detail formerly only used by novelists. There may be a few examples from the 60's -- The Prisoner comes to mind -- but even that can't really touch the narrative layers we've seen in the last decade: The Wire, Lost, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Battlestar Galactica, Game of Thrones (TV as novel if there ever was one), Six Feet Under, Dexter, Band of Brothers, and so forth. These aren't just books, they're novels.
This I think is partially the result of the ability of viewers to sit down and spend concentrated time with a series when they come out on DVD. The first time my wife and I did this was maybe 10 years ago with Buffy and Angel, and it was the most fun I'd ever had with television. This was a new experience. We'd lose 4 or 5 hours late on a Friday just chaining one after another, like the Battlestar Galactica skit on Portlandia.
What I think Netflix is doing, and probably what it has massive amounts of data to back up (I watched Buffy through Netflix, come to think of it), is that this new type of viewer engagement -- long sessions of series "gorging" -- has completely transformed the way we experience television. I think this is why they released the House of Cards episodes all at once. This is also probably why they're not releasing viewing numbers -- the new experience context of contemporary viewers has very little to do with the old Nielsen ratings arc, and would be a poor measure of the show's success, from Netflix' own point of view.
Well in terms of economics what you're talking about is more specialization and niche audiences being served. HBO made itself into the network to watch smart television during the last decade. Right now that's less true as other networks figured out that people like smart things.
I'd say if you were not watching "The Wire" or "Six Feet Under" that you're missing out on something rather interesting. "The Wire" was unique partially because it was like a very long, very good movie in terms of quality and respect for the audience.
There's so much good television now that I don't have patience for the argument that TV is worthless. I don't turn on the television except to watch something specific but when I do I find the quality seems to get better year after year even with my favorite shows ending. More shows are willing to experiment and try to reach new audiences.
I won't speak to the shows on Discovery or whatever since they sound dumb to me but the shows with actual plot and characters are better than ever.
You are so very wrong. Hardly any marketing is done for US shows abroad. You could easily miss the premiere of a new season if you weren't paying close attention.
US shows are thrown on the air mostly as filler, with some rare exceptions they are not the big moneymakers for non-US stations. Although not as carelessly as in the days before DVD box sets and mass piracy, when a episodes could be shown in the wrong order, series just disappear from the schedule unannounced for months, or stay on the shelve for years.
But they will still happily announce a series as "the new hit series from the US", knowing full well that the show has already been cancelled and they only have the 13 episodes to air... This is also largely because US shows are sold as package deals. If you want to buy House for your local market, you also have to buy the rights to crappy series you know nobody will watch, at least not on your station. So even if there is a potential audience for those series, they will barely get a chance to watch the series, since it will be programmed at some ungodly hour.
The Dutch broadcasters managed to ruin many shows like for instance Six Feet Under or Battlestar Galactica that way. Yeah, lots of people still saw them, but either pirated or on DVD. Following them on television was near impossible.
It's a business-model that prefers to destroy a popular product in order to maintain an artificial scarcity rather than to sell it directly to the consumers at reasonable price.
Maintaining this model ensures Hulu is never going to be available outside the US, unless the whole local broadcast market completely collapses.
Because there is more money to be made in ensuring that a show does not reach its audience. That's how fucked up the system is.
You mean except for The Sopranos, The Wire, The Shield, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The West Wing, Six Feet Under, Dexter, BSG (gak), Friday Night Lights, Lost, Sons of Anarchy, Deadwood, Extras, Damages, Weeds (gak), House...
What's tricky about this comparison is that there's so much North American TV. A lot of it is ABC sitcoms, yes.
I'm that guy too. I hate TV.
Except heroes and house. Ohhh. The daily show. Colbert Report. Gotta catch south park and sarah silverman. Six feet under was pretty good, too...
Other then that TV sucks. I watch TV shows, but have no TV. The trick is to download your tv from the internet so you can dodge the ads concentrated power scientifically calibrate to manipulate you, and still get a dose of culture and electronic sedation.
Out of things currently airing -- Battlestar Galactica, Weeds, Heroes, in that order.
The greatest TV show of all time is Six Feet Under. If you've never watched it, you're in for the best 64 hours of visual media of your life.
http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3420704/Six_Feet_Under_season_1