The second in a series of posts about Six Feet Under

Previously:

• Six Feet, Infinite Dimensions

A relic of the late pre-algorithmic age, Six Feet Under benefited from being made when established techniques were being sized up for new purposes. You can see the old world in its story structure, from the death of the week openings to the way the character development sometimes jumps between episodes. A streaming-era show would detail every moment. With a week between broadcasts, we assumed life went on while we weren’t looking. The relative age of the show is also clear from its soap-opera character dynamics, where people talk circles around a problem instead of dealing with in an eight episode arc.

At the risk of repeating myself, the show’s strength comes through the finitude of its movements. You sense an awareness of how much space these characters can spend working through any given issue. Forgive me, but – it’s a sensibility not purely in hock to the market. It’s not just the Dennis Potter hand-me-downs, then, that mark this as an attempt at Serious Telly. There’s also an earnest commitment to showing that we are the sum of our experiences. As the daughter of a sexually open, therapy-saturated family, say, or as the son of a distant parents in a house where the dead come to rest.

Crucially, there’s also an attempt to show how that calculation keeps changing through time. None of us will ever pay off the debts of our history, but who can honestly say they’ve got a handle on the accounting?

When Brenda an Nate start fucking again in season four – after all that work and loss and distance – we are beyond the will-they-won’t-they dynamics of old TV from the start. They already have, they will again. Meantime, we wait to see how this variation will play out. The more traditional structure suits this approach well, it turns out. We observe these slow additions as we would the changes in manner at out own awkward family dinners, our work lunches, our lurching attempts to keep up with old friends.

The constant stack of bodies piling up around these scrambled routines serves as a final, crude reminder that there are so many episodes left to go.