SIX FEET UNDER: PILOT {SERIES PREMIERE} (TV)
Summary
The pilot in this series about the Fisher clan, a loving -- if dysfunctional -- family struggling to maintain a sense of normalcy in the face of the stressful day-to-day operations of the eccentric family business, a funeral home in Los Angeles. The drama is interrupted by faux commercials for funeral-home products. This program opens as family patriarch Nathaniel Fisher is killed in a car accident. His family members are introduced as they hear of his death. Fisher's oldest son Nate gets the news at the airport, after having sex in a broom closet with Brenda, a woman he has just met. He is ambivalent about the family he has come to town to visit. The hard to read Ruth Fisher gets the phone call about her husband while making dinner. She tells her younger son David, who telephones Nate and their younger sister Claire with the news. Nate, Claire, and Ruth go to the morgue to identify their father's body. In private, the troubled Claire admits to Nate that she feels terrible because she is still under the influence of crystal meth she smoked at a party. The three siblings drive home in Claire's lime green hearse, and Nate's unpleasant memories of growing up as an undertaker's son come flooding back. Fisher's employee Federico, a close friend of the family, is working on Nathaniel's corpse when David and Nate join him, somberly taking in the image of their dead father. David excuses himself after getting a phone call from his lover Keith; viewers learn that the repressed David has yet to reveal his homosexuality to his family. Desperate to get out of the house, Nate and Claire go to the supermarket. Nate gets a call from Brenda, but their initially playful conversation ends sourly, and she hangs up on him. The next morning, everyone in the family is working out a different way of grieving over Nathaniel's death. David, while mending his father's facial wounds, has a daydream revealing the bitterness he harbors toward his father. On a morning run, Nate imagines letting himself get hit by a bus. At the viewing that night, Nate opens up to Claire, revealing his dissatisfaction with the way in which his life is going. Keith shows up to pay his respects, and David is aggravated to see him around the family. When Ruth breaks down crying, David and Nate comfort her in a back room, where she shares a secret through her tears: she cheated on their father. During and after the burial, personal and family tensions come to a head as Nate and David come into conflict over modes of grieving, Claire chats with her father's ghost, Brenda gives Nate a second chance, David turns to Keith for comfort, and Ruth asks her elder son to stay in town for a few extra days.
Details
- NETWORK: HBO
- DATE: June 3, 2001 9:00 PM
- RUNNING TIME: 1:02:36
- COLOR/B&W: Color
- CATALOG ID: T:65310
- GENRE: Drama
- SUBJECT HEADING: Drama; Comedy; Families; LGBT Collection; Women's Collection - Drama
- SERIES RUN: HBO - TV series, 2001-2005
- COMMERCIALS: N/A
CREDITS
- Robert Greenblatt … Executive Producer
- David Janollari … Executive Producer
- Alan Ball … Executive Producer, Director, Created by, Writer
- Alan Poul … Co-Executive Producer
- Christian Taylor … Producer
- Lori Jo Nemhauser … Co-Producer
- Richard Marvin … Music by
- Thomas Newman … Theme Music by
- Peter Krause … Cast, Nate Fisher
- Michael C. Hall … Cast, David Fisher
- Frances Conroy … Cast, Ruth Fisher
- Lauren Ambrose … Cast, Claire Fisher
- Freddy Rodriguez … Cast, Federico Diaz
- Mathew St. Patrick … Cast, Keith Charles
- Rachel Griffiths … Cast, Brenda Chenowith
- Richard Jenkins … Cast, Nathaniel Fisher
- Eric Balfour … Cast, Claire's Meth Date
- Garrison Hershberger … Cast, Kroehner Representative
- Dina Waters … Cast, Chatty Mourner
- Sharon Madden … Cast, Woman Mourner
- Hayden Tank … Cast, Young Nate
- Maximillian Orion Kesmodel … Cast, Young David
- Dennis Anderson … Cast, Market Clerk
- Harper Roisman … Cast, Elderly Man
- Dennis J. Lau … Cast, Morgue Attendant
- Audrey Gelfand … Cast, Crying Sicilian Mother
- Jennifer Griffin … Cast, Crying Sicilian Daughter