Six Feet Under Review

The cold open is one of the great formal devices, a death every week that the Fishers then have to process professionally while failing to process anything privately. It works because the deaths are usually mundane and the grief is always somebody else's, which forces the show to be about avoidance rather than mourning. Frances Conroy is extraordinary, playing a woman whose composure has been a fifty year performance and who has no idea what is underneath it.

Michael C. Hall gives the more precisely calibrated turn, a man managing his own respectability like an inventory, and Rachel Griffiths is asked to be unlikeable for years and never flinches from it. The middle seasons sag, particularly around Nate, who is written as a man having the same crisis repeatedly. The show also lets its dream sequences do work that scenes should be doing. None of that matters much against the last six minutes, which resolve the entire series in one sequence and remain the most complete ending television has managed.