A fly on the wall of Fisher & Sons

I just finished watching the season finale of the first season of Six Feet Under, an HBO original series. I have a medical background I’ve worked in hospital laboratories and I even watched an autopsy once, but I haven’t had much personal experience dealing with death issues. Therefore, this show has been a real eye opener for me. This show has taken me in as a fly on the wall of the funeral home of Fisher & Sons and into the lives of the family who owns it. We also get a glimpse of their loved ones, acquaintances, adversaries and clientele. The show opens with one of the Fisher sons, Nate, coming home for the holidays, meeting a girl (Brenda), and losing his father. Thankfully, his father still has a major role in this series!

I love this show, for the most part. What Ally McBeal is to the law, this show is to the funeral business, although Six Feet Under is a bit darker than Ally McBeal. What I love about this series is both the certainty and uncertainty it brings. One certainty is that someone will most assuredly die at the beginning of each episode. We’ve been through the gamut of a 3 week old dying to septuagenarians dying. The uncertainty includes how the characters will die, (natural causes to hate crimes), how their survivors handle their deaths, how the members of the Fisher clan handle their business, jobs (mom gets a job as a flower arranger in a florist’s shop) and, in case of the teenage daughter, Claire, high school. The show details how the Fisher clan handles their love lives and other outside activities.

For someone like me, who has short-term memory issues, it is amazing that I could sit and write down the death of the week from each episode! I’m the type that can barely remember “Oh my god, they killed Kenny!” on South Park every week. The vivid images portraying their demises, the “fade” to glaring white between some scenes, the use of music (“Ain’t that a hole in the head” when the motivational speaker hits his head at the bottom of a swimming pool. “I will survive” when the newly divorced woman gets her head flattened while standing up through the roof of a moving limo.), does the trick.

The characters are so memorable and full of paradoxes. At first, the most responsible Fisher seems to be David, the brother that never left home, and helped maintain the family business. Very soon we find out that he is actually a gay sex addict who has unprotected sex and he has taken his dad’s place as deacon of their church. Nate (played by Peter Krause--who knew he had any personality after that travesty “Sports Night”) turns out to be the most normal of the bunch, having stayed away from the family business as long as possible. Dad Fisher who gets hit by a bus while driving the new hearse while trying to sneak a cigarette on his way to picking up Nate at the airport on the first episode, still has “interactions” with all of his family members throughout the show. (Many of the recently deceased characters still interact and converse with the living, especially David, on this show. This is a great technique used on this show). At dad’s memorial service, mom admits her affair with her hairdresser (played by Ed Begley, Jr.) to her sons, and during the season is pursued by another suitor, Nicoli, played by Ed O’Ross (her boss at the flower shop). There is a short stint by Ilyeana Douglas (“Action”) as an eccentric morgue assistant.

Brenda, Nate’s girlfriend, and her brother Billy are children of a psychiatrist couple played by Joanna Cassidy and Robert Foxworth. If you think the Fishers are a dysfunctional family, check out Brenda’s family! Billy needs medication to stay sane, and Brenda is a masseuse who is a good person, but is just plain warped. Into the season, we find that she was the case study another psychiatrist used for the subject of his book for children.

What else do I love about this show? The dark humor of the show immerses me. The daughter drives a pastel green hearse to school. The daughter is scorned by her lover whose toes she has sucked in the back of said hearse, and in retaliation, she then places a deceased client’s foot in his locker. A deceased client gets to that state by being clubbed with a frying pan by his bored wife.

There are few moments in the show that I would have edited out. The commercials for funeral home supplies and products that were shown only in the first episode (thank goodness) were a little over the top. Although these were informational, I don’t believe they were for real, were they? Sometimes I don’t want to watch the brothers have to run their business (a little diaper cream took the edge off of a dead client’s scar)… it’s somewhat uncomfortable having to watch them deal with their customers who have to arrange funerals… having to talk about preparing a dead baby. But I think this is just a personal problem I have. I think this show is a public service for preparing people like me for the inevitable. It helps me address my own mortality and those of my loved ones.

Just watching some of the vignettes from the living is worth the admission. Six Feet Under makes me laugh, cry and grieve all within the same hour. I could go on and on about memorable situations that occur on this show, because, like I said before, amazingly, the execution of the show makes me remember lots of it – it’s a work of art. But just watch it for yourself when it comes on in reruns! I am spellbound by it. It makes me think. It makes me feel! Yes, I’m a fly on the wall. I hope they keep the swatter away so I can see what happens next!