Six Feet Under begins with a death. Not a violent one, not a mysterious one — a quietly ordinary one, a man driving a hearse on Christmas Eve, lighting a cigarette, and running a red light at precisely the wrong moment. Nathaniel Fisher Sr. is gone before the title card, and the Fisher family’s reckoning with that loss will take five seasons to complete. What Alan Ball understood, and what the pilot establishes with the confidence of a writer who knows exactly what kind of show he is making, is that death is not the subject of Six Feet Under — it is the lens. Every episode will look at living through the fact of dying, and the pilot’s structural and tonal decisions are all in service of that single, clarifying idea. For writers thinking about how to build a show around a theme rather than a plot, this is one of the purest examples the medium has produced.
The pilot’s thematic architecture is established through a device that the show will use for its entire run: the cold open death. Each episode begins with a stranger dying, and that death becomes the week’s client, the week’s occasion for reflection, the week’s oblique mirror held up to the Fisher family’s own unresolved grief. In the pilot, that structure is introduced and immediately put to work — Nathaniel’s death is the Fisher family’s cold open, and everything that follows is their first, fumbling attempt to be both the bereaved and the people who handle the bereaved. That doubling — the Fisher home is also the Fisher funeral home, the place of private grief is also the place of professional service — is the show’s central dramatic irony, and it is in place from the pilot’s first scene. Writers seeking story structure help with thematically driven drama will find the pilot’s construction of that irony worth studying in precise detail: the premise and the theme are, here, the same thing, and building a show where that is true requires a particular kind of structural thinking from the very first page.
The ensemble is introduced with remarkable economy and warmth. Nate, David, Ruth and Claire Fisher are each defined, within the pilot, by a specific and distinct relationship to Nathaniel’s death — and by extension to the question of what they have been denying themselves while he was alive. Nate is the prodigal son, jolted back into a family he has spent years escaping; David is the dutiful one, whose dutiful life is revealed as a form of self-suppression; Ruth is the wife whose marriage contained a secret that death has now made permanent; Claire is the youngest, too young to have the defences the others have built. Each of these positions is established with the kind of precise, unshowy character writing that looks effortless and is anything but. Close script analysis of how Ball introduces each Fisher in the pilot — the economy of detail, the way each entrance tells us almost everything we need to know — is one of the most instructive exercises available to a writer developing a family drama or any character-dense ensemble. This is exactly the territory where screenplay development support and a detailed script edit can help you understand whether your own characters are arriving on the page with that same specificity and weight.
If you are developing a drama where theme and premise are one — where the world your characters inhabit is also the argument your show is making — I offer script consultancy, story structure support, and detailed screenplay feedback for writers working at that level of ambition. I’d love to read your work.
To find out more read the pilot script here