America Six Feet Under: Serial Death and the Paternal Ghost in Neo-Soap Opera

Year 2005, Issue: 21, 77 - 88, 01.04.2005

Ralph J. Poole

Abstract

Brenda Chenowith is one of the main characters in the US-American television series Six Feet Under, launched in 2001 and now running in its fifth season. The series has been created by Alan Ball who also wrote the Oscar-winning script of the film American Beauty. As in American Beauty, Ball in Six Feet Under chooses the suburban setting to tell an acerbic tale about repressed white America. The series, which arguably is a variant of the soap opera genre, has rightly been called sublimely dark and gothic Balko as it confronts the morbid truths of life especially by highlighting the characters' ignorant and confused manner of dealing with life's petty calamities. With its riotous black humor, the series particularly centers around the absurdities of American funeral rituals, inappropriately reappearing dead persons, and a disastrously disorderly family, namely the Fishers who own and live in a funeral home. In many self-reflexive moments especially filtered through characters adjacent to the Fisher family – like in the quote above by Brenda, the girlfriend of one the Fisher sons – the series continuously comments on what the audience actually sees. These analytical statements not only tellingly observe contemporary funeral service routines and the American way of handling the dead. They also serve as strategies of parodying traditional television family series and are therefore commenting on postmodern popular culture and mass media discourses in general, thus rendering the series into a neo-soap opera. But all these essential digressions notwithstanding, what most blatantly departs from the traditional soap opera formula is the fact of letting the family father die within the series' first five minutes and have him return as a ghostly figure.

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