When creator Alan Ball started working on “Six Feet Under,” he got lots of weird questions. A drama about a family of undertakers? Are you going to actually show bodies? But that was then. This week “Six Feet Under” returns for its second season with major buzz and a Golden Globe tucked into its casket. Ball, who won a best-screenplay Oscar for “American Beauty,” admits he’s relieved. “I’m not quite the freak that everybody was making me feel like I was,” he says. Quite the contrary. While death is dominating real life–from September 11 to the grisly story of the derelict crematory in Georgia–the networks are bringing out their dead everywhere you look. CBS’s “CSI,” about a swaggering team of Vegas forensics experts, is battling “ER” for its spot on the top of the ratings. NBC’s hottest new drama is “Crossing Jordan,” starring Jill Hennessy as a crime-solving, rule-breaking medical examiner. And one of the characters on the WB’s “Glory Days” is a coroner who runs a body farm out of her house. Television programs have long danced with death, of course. But this is the first time that the dead men (and women) have told their tales just as much as the actors do. “I did this job for 15 years,” says Elizabeth Devine, a former L.A. County criminalist who is now a story editor on “CSI.” “And every single time I told someone what I did, they were fascinated. Television creators have finally figured out a way to make it totally cool.”
“Six Feet Under” is the only one of these programs that doesn’t focus on crime-solving, though that’s just one of the many ways it dares to be different. The show centers on the Fishers, a family that lives, loves, fights and embalms together in a Los Angeles funeral home. Like all good dramas, “Six Feet Under” is much more about the richness of its characters–troubled daughter, loopy mother, gay brother, slacker son–than its unusual setting. But the fact that these imperfect people exist with death every day gives the show a wonderfully unpredictable tone and a vicious black humor that only gets more surreal in season two. Like the scene in the first episode where Claire and her boyfriend, Gabe, go to the movies and recognize one of its stars. “Isn’t that the girl you guys are burying? She’s hot,” Gabe says. Claire’s deadpan reply: “She’s hot–and dead.”
The cherry on top of this bittersweet cake is “the death,” the two minutes at the opening of each show where corpses-to-be meet their maker in the most surprising way imaginable–including death by hot dog. Sometimes it’s funny, like the one where the porn star was electrocuted in her bathtub by her cat. Others, like one where a child accidentally shot himself with his father’s gun, are heartbreaking. “A lot of people ask me, ‘How did you come up with that idea?’” says Ball. “It never seemed particularly innovative to me. It’s a show about death. Somebody has to die. Somebody dies at the beginning of each ‘Columbo,’ too.”
The difference is that in “Columbo,” the dead body was a means to an end. In these corpse-centric shows, the cadavers effectively become characters, both before death and after. “Our casting director tells me she has a file of hundreds of people who want to be corpses,” Ball says. The shows use both silicone dummies and real actors to play dead, depending on the size of the part, how much bodily harm the deceased endures and other less plot-specific concerns. “We’re always looking for people who can hold their breath–and not blink,” Ball says. “It’s a lot harder than you’d think.” The shows go to incredible lengths to make the fake bodies, which cost upwards of $20,000, look real. “Six Feet Under” uses human hair and hand-painted freckles. “CSI,” whose investigators rummage through bodies as if they were hunting for buried treasure, has blood in more colors and thicknesses than you want to hear about. Most of these shows have coroners on staff to consult on the finer points of mangled anatomy. Masters did four versions of a woman who died when her limousine drove underneath a low-hanging cherry picker–while she was standing up through the sunroof. “It was important for us to figure out what this flattened-head look was going to be,” he says. By the same token, the shows are careful not to get too realistic. “It’s not a horror movie,” says John Vulich, the special-makeup-effects artist on “Crossing Jordan.” “Being graphic can turn off a certain segment of the audience.”
But these shows are obviously doing something right. Ball has become something of a rock star to the death industry. “I’ve been invited to speak at a lot of undertaker conferences, and I’d actually like to go,” he says. “I really do feel there is an element of heroism in their work. They face what we’re all afraid to face.” The corpse corps isn’t always as complimentary about each other, however. “‘Crossing Jordan’ is garbage,” says “CSI’s” Devine. “They make up a lot of the evidence stuff.” Not so, say the folks at “Jordan.” “I know there’s times when we’ve cheated things a little bit, but only when it’s absolutely necessary,” replies Vulich. “We pride ourselves on detail and realism. People get catty about things.” With all this stiff competition, don’t be surprised if these shows keep fighting it out to the death.
