Six Feet Under Opts for Cremation

One of the core features of the modern echo chamber is that criticism, when it does arrive, is so paralyzing that the truly deluded narcissist responds by not only agreeing with it, but embracing it. The whole last season of Six Feet Under was an amazing exercise in self-erasure, ending with what had to be the most absurd finale in the history of TV: an extended flash forward featuring all the characters looking like frosted mini wheats, partaking of a coda that eliminated each one's life, skipping straight forward to death. While this conceit smacks of the Senator Blutarsky bit at the end of Animal House, it was also a most apropos way for this thing to go up in smoke: a distillation that focuses on the bits caught in the drain rather than the strained liquid.

There were two main elements this season that made the self-immolation really piquant: 1. the show really tried hard, for most of the season, the blaze a new trail in how much disinterest they could produce in their characters. Nate turned into a complete, exxed out idiot, finally spiraling through killing a bird, raving like a lunatic, and then Quakerism and a new no fight resolve, only to disappear in a blessed silence, but like all characters, only until the next episode where he came back preachier than ever as a ubiquitous ghost. It was very appropriate that a recent list of overrated movies included American Beauty just as this thing was sending its last cinders up the flue: Alan Ball has finally shown that just keeping some dust or garbage in suspension by dint of a cyclotron and a lucky updraft does not a career make. At least he seems to realize, Stockholm-style, that he has nothing to say and that, as Kerouac once said, all he can offer the world is his own confusion (I'll take K's though). Wait, that was the other element (#2): the void.

Ultimately, though, it's the ending: the idea of seeing each person just expire at ridiculous arbitrary dates in the future, that is so foreceful in its stupidity that it does reach back and erase in a way that is stunning, making a joke out of all that had come before. Congrats, folks, go have a drink. It's a wrap (sar(a/i)n).