Everything has its time and everything dies
Ah, television. Sometimes you kill shows while they’re still in their prime, making us wonder what might have been. Sometimes you keep shows alive on life support long after they should have whithered and gone. And very occasionally, you get it just right, ending their lives at the natural and right time.
It seems apt that the first time I write about Six Feet Under should be after the final episode has aired. This was a programme steeped in embalming fluid from its very first scene to its last. Five years ago it began with the death of Fisher family patriarch Nathaniel and ended with a fast forward skim to the end of the life of everyone who hadn’t already joined him.
What’s been interesting about the final series of Six Feet Under, though, is how the prospect of an imminent end seems to have raised the bar for the production team and the writers, returning it back to the level of great television attained by the first two series. Although it was still better than most TV, the third and fourth series had shown themselves beginning to head down the soapish path followed by many other drama series before, where the only way to advance the plot was to throw bigger and bigger traumas at the characters to give them more and more to react to and be damaged by. Instead of the imminent end of the series becoming an excuse to throw in every plot idea that hadn’t been used yet, the writers took the opportunity to give some closure to the Fishers’ story, wrapping up the major plot threads and sending the characters off into new stories of their own. (Personally, I find myself wishing for an At Home With The Chenoweths spinoff, which would be the world’s most dysfunctional sitcom, but I’m strange that way)
While I doubt the ending was planned from the beginning, it felt like a natural finishing point to this story, turning the complete run of Six Feet Under into what was effectively a novel for television, with a definite beginning, middle and end, even if the middle was a bit like the centre of any overlong novel with subplots drowning out the main theme for a while. With any luck, Channel 4 will have kept the rights to repeats of the early series and will be able to show them on More4 when they reach the end of their Sopranos run. At least then it’ll be in a home that suits it – it always felt rather degrading to have viewing of Six Feet Under continually interrupted by trailers for E4’s latest attempt to lower the common denominator even further with yet more Hollyoaks late night spinoffs (‘Look kids! It’s on after 9pm so we can say ‘cock’ and show breasts yet still not need to think up a plot or hire people able to act!’)
Which brings us neatly to Rome in which the BBC combine with HBO to show just how much you can achieve when you combine what may be the largest budget-per-episode for a TV series ever with post-watershed BBC Two and American pay-cable sensibilities and top it off with a cast of recognisable, yet still affordable, British actors. Yes, you end up with Polly Walker being showered in the blood of a freshly slaughtered bull. In any other series, that may have been a signature, defining image, immortalised for the ages, but in Rome it’s just part of the furniture in a city where full-frontal nudity and mindless violence mix seamlessly with high politics and dynastic scheming. It’s a Horrible Histories for grown-ups, really, complete with an almost Life Of Brian-esque approach to the menu with both tench and dormouse available for your delectation. Meanwhile, Mark Anthony is declaring ‘Brutus, my old cock!’ and newly-returned soldiers and getting into fights and domestic arguments.
Coupled with the fact that it’s an Anglo-American co-production filmed at Cinecitta studios in Italy, it all sounds like a recipe for TV disaster, a bizarre clash between The Borgias and Cleopatra but there’s something about Rome that keeps it just on the right side of self-parody,even with the BBC’s bizarre decision to speed up the action by combining the first two episodes shown in the US into one 50-minute episode here. It might be the attention to detail in the sets, complete with rubbish, graffiti and hordes of extras that makes it feel like a living, breathing city rather than a set, it might just be the sheer brio with which every detail of Roman life is thrown up onto the screen in the hope that something will stick or it might just be that it’s extremely well-acted with I, for one, already anticipating some great scenes between Ciaran Hinds’ Caesar and Kenneth Cranham’s Pompey in the weeks to come.
It’s interesting that Rome begins as Six Feet Under ends as they’re at two opposite ends of the TV spectrum, one subtle and underplayed, while the other is brash and loud, but both make good TV in their own individual way.
Finally, back in my very first column, I reviewed the new American series Threshold which is about to get a British broadcast on Sky One. It’s not great TV, and its desire to be that Holy Grail of certain network executives, the new X-Files is obvious to see, but it’s good fun and is aware of it’s own pulpy, shlocky roots so doesn’t take itself completely seriously. Plus, Peter Dinklage’s performance in it goes from strength to strength and with or without Threshold he seems destined for a long and successful acting career.