"Six Feet Under"

2001-2005
-created by alan ball
Superbly acted. Very well written. One of the more realistic shows you'll ever watch - which is perhaps its flaw. It's so unrelentingly realistic, it can be depressing. So chock full of the day-in, day-out depressing things which happen to us all, that even happy things carry the anticipation of the inevitable depressing thing to come. You might not mind that with other shows, but the hyper-realism here makes it more oppressive. It's admirable...but at a certain point one is tempted to say, "I have real life, i don't need this!" Entertainment needs to take us out of our lives - which is not to say that the show needed mermaids or three sexy warlock brothers (or maybe it does mean that just a little, as creator ball added naked vampires and faeries to his subsequent [and superior] show).
But SIX FEET UNDER is an achievement worth noting, for perhaps more than any show ever, it showed us how stupid smart people are. I don't mean the bunglings of brainiacs, a la BIG BANG, but average, everyday "intelligent" people. "Dumb" is not a word anyone would think to apply to any of these characters were you to meet them in real life, yet watched objectively, you can see how pathetically stupid we are. In family life and above all romance, everyone makes selfish, possessive, hurtful choices OVER AND OVER AND OVER. Indeed, that's the only time the show ever feels contrived, in very occasional moments when you might be tempted to say, "Come on - NOBODY is that pig-headed!" But i think we really are. There's not even that one character who embodies the "voice of reason", so to speak...the hippie sister tries to be that, the gay couple try to be more evolved...but really, no. SIX FEET UNDER is a compelling portrait of how truly dysfunctional humans are at this point in history - trapped by barbaric notions of monogamy and selfishness, forever seeking to use others to fill these horrible, gaping holes inside us. It ain't pretty.
I offer no "best-of" list, as there is an almost inevitable uniformity to the episodes. Never great, never just okay, the show plowed happily along (although in the spirit of full disclosure, i must mention that i watched it on a library set, and scratches kept me from viewing maybe 25% of the episodes).
For all you TV history buffs, series regular Peter Krause is starting to make a career out of starring on the show BEFORE the creator got it right. For both alan ball and aaron sorkin, he was in a product that gained some acclaim or a cult following, but was never nearly as good as the subsequent series (TRUE BLOOD and sorkin's THE WEST WING).