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Six feet under pilot script12/24/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Peter Krause (“Nate Fisher”): When I read the pilot script, I didn’t put it down. I mean, I don’t want to just fuck it up arbitrarily, but if we can make the characters messier and weirder, yeah, absolutely.” Could you make it more fucked up?”Īnd I told them, “Well, yeah… I would be very happy to fuck it up for you. “You know that show we talked about? Well, here’s a version of it that I just wrote.”Īfter they read it, they invited me in, and I went in and met with Carolyn and with Chris Albrecht, who was running HBO at the time, and they said, “We really like this, but we have a main note for the whole thing: It feels kind of safe. So I just wrote the pilot on spec and had my agent send it over to HBO. I gave it a shot, but it’s not where I want to be. I had two years left on my TV deal, and people were already calling me and saying, “Oh, we have this washed-up comedian who’s going to do his own show, and you’re the perfect person to write it for him” or “I have this great idea about this guy who dies who’s reincarnated as a dog, and he gets adopted by his ex-wife…” I thought: I can’t go back into that sitcom world. So I went home to Atlanta for Christmas break, because my mom was still alive back then, and I just wrote the pilot. I really like that idea, but I can’t because I’m doing this sitcom.” And not too long after that, ABC very graciously cancelled my other commitment. But I was doing this other show, and I’m not a person who could do two shows at once, so I said, “Well, good luck with that. I met with her, and she told me that she had been thinking about a TV series set in a family-run funeral home, and something in my head just clicked. That was right around the time I had just discovered The Sopranos, and I was amazed that, like, “Oh, TV can be this?” So I got call from Carolyn Strauss’ office asking if I would meet her for lunch. But American Beauty had premiered in September of that year as well. On the 10th anniversary of Six Feet Under‘s much-praised finale, we caught up with the show’s creator and cast for a long-overdue eulogy.Īlan Ball (Creator/Showrunner): In the fall of 1999 I was working on this television series that I created for ABC called Oh, Grow Up, which, in retrospect, I’m not sure is a show that I myself would have ever watched. While fans of the show immediately began mourning its imminent passing, there was one thing they weren’t counting on: its finale, one of the most finely executed hours of television and a fitting send-off for a series that found beauty in life’s most tragic moments. ![]() ![]() Six Feet Under‘s fifth season would be its last. In 2004, while averaging about 6.2 million viewers per week (beating out the most watched seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Wire), HBO made the announcement that Ball was ready to bury his creation, just as he had so many of its characters. It also won that year’s Golden Globe for Best Drama Series, plus a Peabody Award for “its unsettling yet powerfully humane explorations of life and death.” Far from being just a critical darling, audiences were coming along for the ride, too - its fanbase grew larger with each season. Hall.ĭuring its first season alone, the series earned a total of 23 Emmy nominations in 2002, including nine acting nods. And the who’s-who ensemble cast could not have been stronger: Peter Krause, Rachel Griffiths, Lauren Ambrose, Frances Conroy, Richard Jenkins, Freddy Rodríguez, and Michael C. What the Oscar-winner came back with was Six Feet Under, a deeply nuanced meditation on life, death, and the ties that bind (and strangle) within the Fisher & Sons funeral home that could be painfully funny, gut-wrenchingly depressing (each episode began with a death), and surprisingly uplifting. And so they set their sights on American Beauty screenwriter Alan Ball, pitching him on the very basic idea of creating a “series set in a family-run funeral home.” The “It’s Not TV” cable network realized a simple, but often overlooked, programming principle: unique voices make for unique television. While network television continued raking in the advertising dollars with surefire bets and lowest-common denominators, the premium cable channel was kickstarting its own quiet revolution, finding success in a variety of genres from pop-cultural phenomenons ( Sex and the City) to the ground-zero of modern prestige dramas ( The Sopranos). But it’s impossible to look at the currently lush television landscape without acknowledging the debt that most popular shows owe to HBO at the turn of the new millennium. It’s easy to imagine that, 15 years from now, television audiences will take for granted the existence of groundbreaking series like Orange Is the New Black and Transparent. ![]()
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