HBO grateful for the dead HOW do you follow “The Sopranos”?
HBO is counting on a new series, about another dysfunctional family that is surrounded by death, to keep viewers watching until the mob opera returns again next year.
The show, “Six Feet Under,” is about a family-owned funeral home, and Oscar-winner Alan Ball (who created the show) isn’t scared at the comparisons between “Six Feet Under,” and “The Sopranos,” which ends its season this Sunday.
As Ball sees it, a family is a family – whether it’s the extended Soprano mob clan or the Fishers, who own the Fisher & Sons funeral parlor around which “Six Feet Under” is esoterically (and often humorously) framed.
“I didn’t consciously try to copy ‘The Sopranos’ – it just seems that, up until fairly recently, most funeral homes were family-run businesses,” says Ball, who won an Academy Award for his “American Beauty” screenplay.
“And ‘The Sopranos’ is my favorite show on TV,” he says. “So I’m incredibly flattered that my show would even be mentioned in the same breath.”
It has to be, if only because “Six Feet Under” resonates deeply in that same odd, darkly funny fashion that “Sopranos” fans find so compelling and appealing.
If the show’s June 3 premiere is any indication, the Los Angeles-based Fishers will be matching the Jersey-based Sopranos for quirky, disturbing behavior. The premiere begins with the ironic death of patriarch Nate (Richard Jenkins) – forcing the Fishers to confront themselves and each other over long-held secrets (affairs, drug use and homosexuality) encompassing widowed mom Ruth (Frances Conroy) and her sons, ne’er-do-well Nate (Peter Krause) and tightly wound David (Michael Hall), who followed (grudgingly) in dad’s undertaker footsteps.
There’s also wild-child daughter Claire (Lauren Ambrose) – who hears about dad’s death while smoking crack.
One of the more, well, different touches in “Six Feet Under” are the fake “commercials” that introduce each scene. They’re brightly shot with catchy jingles and shill everything from embalming fluid to hearses.
“It’s my little nod toward the context of network TV,” Ball says. “Network TV is really perfect for the marketing medium, and death is, after all, a business where services and goods are marketed.
“It’s disgusting, creepy and ghoulish – but it is part of the service economy,” he says. “Like all those feminine hygiene products, hemorrhoidal suppositories and toilet paper that are marketed in a cheerful, pleasant way.”