1x01 Pilot

[6.2/10] Sometimes I forget how long ago 2001 was. That sounds weird to say. (I promise you, I know how to count.) But the world has changed a great deal in the last twenty years, and those changes assuredly extend to the world of television. When I cued up a venerated HBO drama from the early 2000s, I expected something that felt of a piece with The Sopranos or The Wire or Deadwood. What I got was...this.

The pilot of Six Feet Under is not bad exactly, but it’s also a show that has more in common with The West Wing or louder network T.V. dramas than with those other prestige series that reset the standard for realism, psychology, and storytelling on television. Everything in the opening chapter of the show is very direct, frequently cheesy, and often rather cliched. If I didn’t know better, I’d guess that it was made in 1991 instead of 2001.

That means resetting your expectations as a viewer: for the level of subtlety, style of dialogue, and overall approach for a new-to-you series. Enough people whose opinions I respect laud this show as in deserving companies with those other vaunted HBO dramas, and pilots are almost always a case of a show finding its voice. So it behooves us (read: me) to keep an open mind. Suffice it to say, this was a rocky start.

The core of that rockiness comes from the characters, the bulk of whom feel profoundly stock. The worst offender there is Nate, the proto-Jeff Winger and wayward thirty-five-year-old with daddy issues who left home at his first opportunity. Nate seems to be our perspective character, despite an ensemble cast, and his generic middle-aged free-thinking black sheep routine, which the show seems to built around in the early going, is not a great sign.

But there’s not much beyond him either. The show quickly tries to establish a sassy, off-beat love interest in the form of Brenda, who’s not only pretty annoying in the early going, but who can’t cut through the show’s forced attempts at chemistry between her and Nate. The Fisher family matriarch, Ruth, has the germ of a good idea behind her character as the good and proper wife who was secretly bristling enough at her husband to cheat on him, but the show makes her a pretty thin archetype in this early episode. Claire, the youngest Fisher sibling, is another stock bad kid, still in her crystal meth-smoking teenage rebellion phase. None of these players are terribly original or compelling.

The one exception here is David, the middle Fisher kid who’s stuck around to take over the family business. It’s here that I’ll admit my pre-existing appreciation of Michael C. Hall from his turn in Dexter, which may be coloring my judgment here. And yet, Hall genuinely does better than anyone in the cast at turning the pilot’s cornball, on-the-nose dialogue into something that feels real and affecting. His character is also the show’s most interesting and unique. He’s a man of contradictions -- seemingly inheriting his mother’s obsession with propriety while secretly engaging in a lifestyle that much of society unduly considered improper, and dreaming of getting away from the family business while feeling it’s his responsibility and his burden despite not being very good at it and resenting his siblings over it. There’s more to David, both in terms of performance and character, than in any of the show’s other major figures.
But it’s hard to blame the performers too much when the script is this over-the-top and the style of the show seems so campy. Almost every emotion in this first episode is played to the cheap seats. Some of that can be attributed to the fact that each member of the Fisher family is coping with the loss of the family patriarch, so it’s fair to expect emotions to be more outsized than they’d be in a normal setting. Even so, the reactions and choices the character make feel more cartoony than they reflect the myriad shades of grief we all experience at a time of profound loss.

The saving grace, though, is that the outsized approach works much better in the show’s comic and more imaginative moments. When the series is trying to be a vaguely kooky kitchen sink drama, it falls flat. But when it turns to more impressionistic devices to represent the difficulty of coping with the loss of a loved one and the strange parade of rituals around the business of death, it becomes much more compelling and even funny.

The easiest of these is the way Nathanial Fisher, the deceased dad, appears to each of his surviving family members. It’s a shame that Richard Jenkins is unlikely to keep making appearances given his character’s...er...circumstances, and when the show plays his reappearances for drama, as in the cornball closing sequence, it doesn’t work. But when he pops up to haunt his family members, often with sarcastic comments and a wry affect, it’s more engrossing than any of the overblown conversations among other members of the family.

It also allows the show to wring some of its best laughs from this situation. Beyond Nathanial’s amusing sarcasm, the show also earns some yuks from its fake commercials, which satirize the commoditization of everything, up to and including how we leave the mortal coil. Likewise, it gins up some fantastic black comedy from Frederico, an early favorite character, and the way he treats corpse-reconstruction like a work of art. It plays on something true -- the strange intersection between taking justifiable pride in your work and the way the end of life could become something humdrum when you’re around it enough.

The difference between that strain of humor and almost everything else in the episode speaks to the central irony here. The major theme of this pilot is “realness.” Ruth and David are very much in the business of making everything seem fine and presentable, even when they’re quietly cracking up inside. That extends to their literal business -- an effort to make the ugly, unpredictable act of leaving this world into something neat and clean and comprehensible.

The purpose of Nate, then, is to nigh-literally throw dirt on that idea. He wants to undress the rituals of grieving, remove the veneers of propriety and let people be people, now more than ever. There’s something messy but human and, most importantly, real at the bottom of all this grief, the episode seems to say, and that shouldn’t be suppressed or hidden.

But the pilot for Six Feet Under does hide it, under reams of cheesy dialogue and over-the-top performances and a generalized hokiness that hobbles an interesting enough premise out of the gate. T.V. evolved quite a bit very quickly around this time period, and much of that evolution was a move toward greater naturalism and realism, or at least the trappings of them, in the presentation. It meant a move away from some of the showier and stagier elements that leave this opening salvo feeling far less profound than it seems to want to be. The pilot’s “things should be more authentic, man!” theme plays pretty trite two decades later, but it wouldn’t be so bad if the show took its own advice.