I guess I now know better than to have an extramarital fling with a deeply kind Quaker while my wife’s pregnant with a child that may or may not be born with serious health problems.
For all those of you who just went “Huh?”or “What the…?”, I’m talking about Six Feet Under, and especially the episode we watched yesterday, called “Singing for our lives” (admittedly, a more evocative title than “The World According to Narm”, which would have been my suggestion).
I’ve always been puzzled with the people on the web who watched Six Feet Under until the final episode but hated Nate Fisher. There seem to be quite a few of them, the series’ reviewer for Television without Pity being a case in point. Yes, Nate is in many ways a self-pitying, egocentric loser – but for one thing, so are many of us a lot of the time… but even more, I always thought that one of the points of Six Feet Under was that it had sympathy and understanding for all its characters, whether they were self-important art school students, neurotics (and boy, were there many of those in the series!), biker dudes, gang leaders, sexually confused young men, druggie sisters, Russian flower shop keepers or dweeby hairdressers. Yes, the series has a strong, at times vicious satiric streak, but I felt that inherently it didn’t really distinguish between good guys and bad guys. It showed you were people were coming from. And it expected at least a willingness to empathise from you.
There are still four episodes for us to watch. And like the first time I watched the series, I will probably want to go back to the beginning and start again. After “Everybody’s Waiting” I felt… bereaved, for want of a better word. I missed the Fishers. In some ways, watching the series again has felt like going through old photo albums and reminding myself of the people who are no longer there.
So, on that happy note: Narm!
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 