We started talking about our favorite television shows, and things quickly spiraled into a comparison between Six Feet Under and The Wire. Obviously, both were on the list, but what exactly was it that pushed The Wire to the front in our minds? What was it that made the 4th and 5th seasons of Six Feet Under (with the exception of the series finale) so distasteful, while The Wire was just so wholly delicious and left us wanting more?
My best answer is that The Wire's writers and production team made a conscious effort to subvert the characters' personal lives in favor of the broader narrative, while Six Feet Under did not. The choice to push the broader narrative of the city and its drug lords, police, docks, schools, and newspapers to the forefront was not made from the beginning, however. The first two and a half seasons are littered with the HBO-standard gratuitous sex scenes and a lot more about each character's personal lives. But as the show progressed, it seems the writers and producers honed their thesis and focused instead on the various systemic ailments that both plague Baltimore's citizens and inadvertently recreate countless versions of the characters we grew to know and love.
This thesis is restated and underscored during the montage in each season finale, and is brought to a depressing yet realistic head in the series finale's montage. In the first season finale, all that the detail worked for is undercut by a montage of drug dealers in various parts of the city and even in New York City (where we leave Omar), nameless yos in every color and ethnic background, untouched by the detail's work. One feels a sense of helplessness, that the problems are just bigger than all of us. Each season finale's montage seems to stress that as much work as each beloved character puts in, there is always going to be more work to do.
The series finale takes that hopelessness one step further. Not only is there always going to be more work to do, but even the characters we'd spent so much time getting attached to are just placeholders; no matter what happens to any of them, there will always be someone else directly behind them, ready to assume their very attitude, conviction, motives, and actions. McNulty's not the only one who cares; Omar is not the only rogue; Carcetti is not going to be the last mayor. The truth is hard to swallow, but that's what makes it all so great. It really feels like truth. Life goes on with or without our characters, with or without us, and what remains is the city and the people who make it go and the motivations that get them there, regardless of their names.
Six Feet Under works backwards from this model. The main ideas and goals are somewhat understood in the beginning: How do people deal with death? What are the ways we prepare/fail to prepare for the inevitable? Does dealing with death on a regular basis affect those questions in any way? And the context in which the characters are placed does a lot to set up our study of these questions: A family who owns a funeral parlor in Los Angeles, California; three children and a widow with their own distinct personalities; first term G.W. Bush; carefully placed generational gaps.
Of course things are going to be closer to home during the first season as the Nathaniel's death is our first case study. However I think as the family heals and moves on the writers continue to do a good job of looking at the main questions through different lenses. They have a good setup: there are plenty of ridiculous and eclectic people in LA whose backgrounds lend themselves both to crazy deaths and to different ways their families deal with them. From bikers to Born Again Christians to Nate's own untrained handling of clients, there's a lot of good material.
And of course if we're looking through the lens of one family, we're going to get close to them. I concede that the scope of The Wire is a lot bigger. Not only were there a lot of main characters, but the focus was on multiple sectors of a city's population. Six Feet Under had a main cast of fewer than 10, and they had mostly interesting lives. There's a young character, an old character, two gay characters, and the entry characters who are most likely the age/generation of most viewers. I truly enjoyed (the beginning of) Brenda and Nate's relationship. I also enjoyed Nate and Claire's relationship. I loved Ruth. I liked David, loved Keith.
But I think the show started to go downhill fast when the focus was more on the personal lives of the characters and less on the funeral parlor and death. What was with David's attacker? Why should I care about Brenda's supposed sex addiction? WTF was up with Rico's affair? And why the hell did Maggie even exist?? The fact of the matter is, I don't care. I didn't sign up to watch Melrose Place, I committed to watching a family deal with death.
What's worse for me is that they lost all that they had set out to do. It wasn't just that they decided to delve into the characters' personal lives, it was that they did so and lost all context that once existed. I used to watch General Hospital with my mom when I was little, and I can pretty much guarantee that if I were to turn it on today, I would be up to speed within 10 minutes. Those names are really all that matter: the Quartermaines, Luke and Laura, Lucky, Mac and Felicia. Even the actors themselves change up every few years, but the characters and even the storylines remain the same. Port Charles? Who cares where it is. It doesn't even matter that there's a port. And the Hospital? I can probably count on 2 hands in all my watching the times when the Doctorness of a character or the setting of the hospital even mattered. But that's a soap opera, and the flaws I've pointed out are its veritable strengths: they put the personal stories at the fore because that's the part people tune in to watch, and it's the part that never changes in spite of all of the tumult of our own real lives.
For Six Feet Under, it soon became irrelevant that they were in LA or that they were of certain ages or that they were a pretty liberal family living during the Bush administration. And for a family so contextualized in the beginning, their actions began to lose all credibility. Take Lisa, for example. Lisa comes into the story as Nate's friend, and as we find out, the mother of his child (a dubious entry, IMO, but I never really warmed up to her). However, her eventual death should have been the perfect opportunity to come back to the heart of the show. Instead, the mystery behind her death is focused on as a source of drama, and the way Nate deals with her death is overtaken by what actually happened to her, an unsolved mystery that points to an affair with her sister's husband, Hoyt. Under suspicion, Hoyt kills himself, and they never really return to the family to see how they cope. I think this a great example of an opportunity that probably never should have existed but was missed anyway.
Six Feet Under is not the only show with a great premise to turn into a soap, regardless of genre. The last two seasons of The West Wing were bogged down by the President Bartlett's illness and desire for a legacy. The Office is a classic example, ruined by Jim and Pam's love and other wedding stories. Even lesser comedies are guilty (see: That 70's Show, which ended up having nothing to do with the '70s after the first season and was just a teen comedy with actors in increasingly less-bell-bottomy bell-bottoms).
I guess this post could go on forever, and it's already much longer than it intended to be, but I guess I'm trying to say that context makes a good show great, it brings in that realistic aspect that so many other shows are missing. But when you lose that context and bog the fictional world down with personal drama, the show's soul and originality is lost.
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