I am a habitual binge-watcher of television shows. This includes both shows I've seen before and shows I have not. Last year for Halloween, I binge-watched the entire series of "Are You Afraid Of The Dark?" with the kids (something they wanna do again this year). In the last year, I've also gone through all 15 seasons of "ER", all 10 seasons of "Friends" and the entire series of "Breaking Bad" (the one show I didn't care for). Ideally, I'd like to pick one show a month and watch the entire thing, but I never seem to have the time to do that, so I take full advantage of the downtime I do have. Such was the case when I decided to watch all 5 seasons of "Six Feet Under". I was in love with this show when it first aired over a decade ago and have always meant to watch it again but never got around to it until the last couple of weeks. And boy, am I glad I finally got to see it again. I've said before that "Lost" is the pinnacle of a dramatic series finale for me, and that remains true, but SFU take the prize for being near-flawless throughout it's entire run. However, the series finale of SFU is just okay - up until the last nine minutes. The final sequence of SFU is FANTASTIC. It's brilliant, beautiful, haunting and sad all at the same time. Most series finales leave you to wonder what became of the characters you watched as their lives continued on. But SFU was a show about death and that's what made its ending all the more satisfying.
"Six Feet Under" centers on the Fisher family in Los Angeles who are gathering together around the holidays. Parents Ruth, the quiet and repressed matriarch of the clan, and her husband Nathaniel, who owns and operates Fisher & Sons Mortuary out of a portion of their home, await the arrival of their eldest son, Nate, for Christmas. Nate is the textbook prodigal son - he left not only the house but the state as soon as he was able and rarely makes it back home, having built a life for himself in Seattle where he manages a food co-op and seems to be enjoying a prolonged adolescence. At 35, he's never had a committed relationship that lasted more than a few months and he's content to keep it that way. Nate's younger brother David is the closeted middle child of the family who gave up his dream of being a lawyer to work alongside dad in the family business. David is in a relationship with Keith, although no one in his family knows he's gay, and is almost the polar opposite of his older brother. A part of him resents Nate for having been able to get out from under the funeral business. The youngest of the Fisher clan is 17-year-old Claire. A late in life baby who is considerably younger than her brothers, Claire has never quite figured out her place in the family. Her parents dote on Nate as their firstborn, but he left the house when Claire was a toddler and the two of them have yet to find any real connection as siblings. Everything changes for the family a few days before Christmas when Nathaniel is killed in a car accident on the way to the airport to retrieve his namesake son. Things are thrown into a chaos that propels the next five seasons of the show to greatness.
SFU is probably the closest anyone has ever gotten to capturing actual family dysfunction in a scripted show. They operate the way of a typical family the entire series run - relationships ebb and flow, people change for better and/or worse and grow together and/or apart, and they're never not dysfunctional in some way, both as individuals and as a whole. Nathaniel's death has repercussions that drastically affect his loved ones lives for many years; Nate moves back to L.A. and begins working in the business he never could stomach, David sets off on a series of dysfunctional hook ups to cope with having to become the head of the business, Claire and terrible decisions with equally terrible men become like a moth to a flame, and Ruth begins living her life as if for the first time, after having been a wife and mother from the age of 19. And dear old dad watches over all of this, appearing to various family members in all five seasons, sometimes just to be a jackass and other time to lend a guiding hand from the great beyond. You actually see everyone battling down their demons because the demons literally get up off the embalming table/out of the casket and try to get the best of each Fisher.
Every episode of SFU opens with a death of some sort, showing us how the person met their end and flashing their name and birth/death dates on the screen. Each of these people end up at Fisher & Sons for their final farewell and are prepared for burial or cremation throughout the episode. Using this format, and a pivotal story arch in the final season, SFU's finale wraps up all that familial drama in a nice little bow. You get the sense that things aren't going to magically become functional from then on, but that each family member has found a new direction and a new lease on life. It threatens to leave us the way so many others have, wondering what ultimately happened to the characters we followed for what was likely the five most important years of their lives. If the finale had ended there, it would've been among the so-so finales in TV history. I certainly wouldn't have felt like it was a good payoff for sticking with the show its entire run. But in its last nine minutes, "Six Feet Under" is at its absolute best. If you watch the entire run and don't cry during those last nine minutes, you is not human yo. I'm not one to even tear up at a lot of stuff and yet those last nine minutes never, ever fail to have me full on ugly crying. Instead of leaving the Fishers behind, we get to see how each met their own end and the lives they lived well, long after we stopped peeking in on a weekly basis. And everything about those scenes (which you can see on YouTube if you don't want to watch the whole show); the music, the makeup, the cinematography, is just absolutely gorgeous. And that's not a word I just throw around, ya'll.
