Six Feet Under - Season Five - TV Review

I never thought it would happen to Six Feet Under. Shows as good as SFU was in the first three seasons don't dissolve into this. How do we get from the end of season three to the depressing, repetitive opening of season five? It will be the kind of freefall that can be examined more closely in future years through the wonder of DVD sets, but for now we can only speculate.

Honestly, I started to worry after the first episode of season four, the most depressing sixty minutes in the history of television. As Nate buried the parts of Lisa's body in the desert, I wondered where the show could go from here. The answer was that life could get even more brutal. Season four was filled with such pain, violence and sadness that the show lost its edge. You wanted the Fisher family and everyone they infected to just commit themselves and get it over with. More life above ground could only lead to more pain.

And yet, I was hopeful going into season five. Knowing this was their last season, I thought that maybe creator Alan Ball and his team would regain that quirky rhythm from the first two seasons and we could just write off last year as a mistake. You would think that knowing that you were headed into the home stretch of your series would reinvigorate you as a writer. At least that's what I hoped.

Well, if this is a reinvigorated SFU, ready to blow us away in the final season, then all that means is more depression. Remember when Nate was funny? When David was charming? When Claire was unpredictable? It gets harder to remember those days as you trudge through the final season premiere, featuring, naturally, a wedding and a miscarriage (one of the few painful life events that the writers must have realized they hadn't tapped in the first four seasons). The theme of season five, at least in the pilot, seems to be that no one changes. Give up because as hard as you try, you're just going to die eventually anyway. And you'll probably be miserable on the way there. The characters in the pilot seem to be asking why. Why do we have kids? Why do we get married? Why do we bother trying to find love? They're interesting, challenging themes and ones that the writers of the first few seasons could have tackled with wit and charm but the current crew can only muster doom and gloom.

No one involved with Six Feet Under, from the characters to the writers finds any joy in life any more. Nate's new wife having a fight with Nate's old DEAD wife highlights even a relatively happy event like a wedding. But nothing's happy on Six Feet Under any more. I know what you're thinking. With a cast this talented and writers this sharp, it's still better than most TV, right? Maybe, but the pain of the season five pilot is heightened by what this show used to be. Don't give me the incredible writing of the peak of this show, some of the best in television history and then take me to this. As Nate says in the episode, "I don't want to grieve any more. I can't. I don't have it in me." Neither do I, Nate. Neither do I.