Remembering 'Six Feet Under': It was honest, fearless, and never nice
It's easy to bury most TV shows and shovel the dirt on their caskets about how they overstayed their welcome. But I truly grieve the death of HBO's ''Six Feet Under," which goes six feet under for good Sunday night at 9. A unique, fearless, and gorgeously messy TV narrative, it will leave prime time a flimsier place as it permanently fades to white.
After all, no other series in the history of the medium has so honestly and steadfastly rendered death and grief. I mean, TV is riddled with cadavers on slabs, organs spilling from them like rubbery fruit, but those crime-show fatalities are always investigated, understood, explained, made logical. They exist in a packaged TV world of law and order, and they feed our collective denial of the randomness and inevitability of death. You can use many phrases to describe ''Six Feet Under," but ''in denial" probably won't be among them. The drama was never -- block your ears if you don't like four-letter words -- nice.
Indeed, the show was madly in love with brutal honesty and psychological dissection. Like Brenda's mother, ''Six Feet Under" refused to sugarcoat its tangled, modern truths -- about death and about life. Sometimes it embraced dark nights of the soul so indulgently it seemed sophomoric, particularly when Claire's artist friends angstfully held forth about the cosmos, or when Nate's self-blame about his wife's death turned him into a raving maniac.
But other times it captured human despair so perfectly and valiantly it was transcendent TV. David's anxiety attacks, Ruth's journey of self, Brenda and Billy's incestuous bond, the ebbs and flows of George and Billy's mental illness, they were all shown with a disarming frankness. They were unvarnished, and undiminished.
The writers, led by creator Alan Ball, brought their rich cast of characters -- and actors -- to places of rage and fear we rarely encounter on TV. ''Six Feet Under" let the Fishers feel their despair over and over again, not just having them make mistakes but having them repeat the same mistakes in a kind of no-exit hell. Nate's identity swung from family man to vain wanderer with the regularity of a pendulum, as he and Brenda replayed their set-piece argument endlessly. One episode, they were meant to be happily together; the next, they were doomed to crash. And David never strayed from his masochistic pattern, returning for Keith's abuse so many different times we knew he must be comfortable with it on some level.
All the relationship back-and-forths may have looked like redundancy, and sometimes it did seem as if the writers were out of ideas, as Rico and Vanessa bickered ad nauseam. But mostly, the plot perseverations were the show's way of capturing the cycles of love, the ons and the offs, the steps forward and backward. The goal was psychological realism. In a lesser show, David and Keith would have split a long time ago; or else turned into an ad for the Martha Stewart lifestyle. Instead, they've reenacted their central conflict, locking horns in between moments of respite and love. They've tried, and failed, and tried all over again.
The raw melodrama of the writing was beautifully served by its actors, a few of whom deserve Emmys they may never get. Michael C. Hall was most extraordinary as David Fisher, bringing great life and nuance to David's pale, stiff mask of a face. Hall disappeared behind his character, so that the question of his own sexual orientation was wonderfully irrelevant. He made the contradictory sides of David -- needing to be in control, needing someone else to be in control -- coexist naturally. And he let David's grief at the loss of Nate ennoble the last weeks of the series. The image of David unable to leave the car at Nate's burial, his expression twisted with dread, is indelible. David grew after his first closeted season, and yet Hall kept the character's essence remarkably consistent and real.
Lauren Ambrose, as Claire, created one of TV's most faceted teens ever. Her red-haired pothead found both comfort and loneliness living on the fringe, and she delivered Claire's gallows humor with subtle comic timing. Claire is in love with cynicism, as attached to it as her mother is afraid of it. Indeed, Claire and Ruth Fisher are beautifully designed characters in part because they define themselves against -- but in relationship to -- each other. And Frances Conroy brought unexpectedly touching dimensions to Ruth, a classic mouse, but a mouse whose roar can be heart-rending.
In the midst of all its chaotic emotionality, ''Six Feet Under" rarely looked disheveled. The visuals were unfailingly exquisite, from the meticulous opening credits to the oppressive drabness of the Fisher home and the cold steeliness of its basement. Last week, as Nate's ghost told a stifling Brenda ''You should have married Billy," the elevator she was riding in elongated and narrowed, like a coffin. It's the kind of throwaway shot that filled the series, and it highlighted the glibness of most network camerawork. Even the show's trademark fades to white had a carefully gauged airiness that spoke of eternity.
The symbolic flourishes have also given ''Six Feet Under" an artful atmosphere, in the manner of the garbage dancing in the wind in Ball's ''American Beauty." This season, as birds descended on Nate Fisher -- on his wedding cake, at his birthday party -- his death became more and more inevitable. It was a lovely, nonverbal heralding of fate. And then his liaison with Maggie, an angel of death with a tragically peaceful face, sealed the deal.
Yes, the series had its share of trying moments, particularly last season, as the story veered into turgid cliche with the resolution of Lisa's death. Ball has chosen the right time to put his show down. But this last season has been a knowing and stirring farewell, giving fans the best the show has to offer -- originality, character depth, and visual poetry. And we can be confident that the final episode, which will be 75 minutes long, won't suddenly flatten out that fullness. Whatever happens to the people of ''Six Feet Under," it won't be pat.
Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. 
