TV Review: Six Feet Under, season 5

TV #23 of 2023:

Six Feet Under, season 5

This final season perpetuates a lot of my existing frustrations with Six Feet Under, and as I watched, I expected that I’d probably give it the same two-star rating that I handed the previous year. The characters are all melodramatic and self-sabotaging far more often than they’re compelling protagonists by this stage, and the show has long passed the point where it’s able to wring much pathos from the established nature of the funeral home setting or any particular client of the week. Luckily the last few episodes mark a step in the right direction, by means of a sudden personal tragedy for the family that in many ways forms a natural bookend with a parallel development back in the pilot. Here again, the survivors are forced to pull together, to confront their own mortality, and to consider the ways in which their paths going forward will be forever altered by the new absence. It’s a melancholic mood I wish the series had been able to maintain throughout.

Before then, however, we have the latest wave of Fisher / Chenowith / Diaz nonsense to sit through. Claire’s dating the walking red-flag Billy, then later drops out of art school and throws a tantrum that her trust fund won’t pay for her nebulously hedonistic lifestyle. In an out-of-nowhere twist a la Pacey in the later seasons of Dawson’s Creek, she ultimately gets a random corporate job and starts a new romance with a guy who’ll always be Danny from The Mindy Project to me. Meanwhile, Nate is feuding with his pregnant wife and falling for his ex-stepsister, which won’t even be the most incestuous thing that the writers decide to spring on us. David and Keith have the most reasonable plot of becoming new parents, while Ruth is mainly just bitter and complaining about everything these days. Rico spends most of the season trying to win back his wife’s affections, although it mostly seems like she just gets tired of fighting him. And as ever, all these folks are still regularly seeing daydream visions of various dead people who function to express their deepest fears.

It’s all fine or at least not too awful, and the ending really does help draw the story together. But I’ve never been as satisfied with this show as it patently is with itself, and I’m happy to finally put it in my rear-view.

[Content warning for gun violence, homophobia, drug abuse, and suicide.]

This season: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Seasons ranked: 3 > 2 > 1 > 5 > 4

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