01:00 AM EDT on Saturday, August 20, 2005

BY ANDY SMITH
Journal Television Writer

Six Feet Under, HBO's drama set in a Los Angeles funeral home, is all about confronting death. Now, after five seasons, the show is ready to fade out, with a final 75-minute episode airing tomorrow night at 9.

Just as well. Six Feet Under was a very good show that had run out of steam.

Its dark humor had virtually disappeared, its innovative touches had grown stale, and its characters had become increasingly mean-spirited, whiny and self-absorbed.

Six Feet Under had become so bleak that it became almost a chore to watch.

Claire's teen angst, which actress Lauren Ambrose nailed perfectly in the early seasons, was getting to be an annoying bore.

And how many times did we need to watch Nate's infidelity, David's insecurity, or Ruth's flighty bad judgment?

The characters seemed locked into repeating the same neurotic patterns, and while that might be a point the show made deliberately, it was becoming tedious.

Oh, yeah, the talking corpses were getting stale, too.

Six Feet Under did regain some of its old spark at the very end, by the daring ploy of killing off Nate Fisher (Peter Krause), its lead character, and letting us watch his family deal with its own grief instead of catering to that of others.

And since this is a eulogy of sorts, it's only fitting that we pause to remember the good things about Six Feet Under.

In a society that does its best to deny death, Six Feet Under made death the central presence of the show.

In the very first episode, family patriarch Nathaniel Fisher died when the hearse he was driving got hit by a bus.

(The senior Fisher was played by Rhode Island actor Richard Jenkins, and his occasional return visits as a sardonic, cigarette-smoking ghost, usually wearing a black suit, were always a treat.)

Every episode of Six Feet Under thereafter opened with a death, illustrating all the myriad ways we depart this world, from the commonplace -- heart attacks, cancer -- to the downright bizarre.

I particularly remember the woman who stuck her head out of a limousine sun roof at an especially unfortunate moment.

The death-of-the-week forced the Fisher family to confront an enormous variety of emotions from its clients -- shock, pain, anger, numbness.

Within the kingdom of death, though, Six Feet Under also made room for humor. Dark humor, to be sure, but humor nonetheless.

There was a porn star's emotional funeral, for example. Or the time rebellious Claire, who drove an old green Cadillac hearse to high school, stole a foot and left it in someone's locker.

"I know stealing a foot is weird. But -- hello! -- living in a house where a foot is available to be stolen is weird," Claire said.

Six Feet Under also gave us some intriguing glimpses at the nitty-gritty world of the death business, from the creepy basement where the embalming was done to the artfully lit display of coffins upstairs.

We even found out about environmentally friendly "green funerals," apparently all the rage in California. And one of my favorite sub-plots in the first two seasons was the attempt by a chain of funeral homes to buy out independents such as Fisher & Sons.

Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball, who won an Oscar for writing American Beauty, told the Los Angeles Times that the point of Six Feet Under is to live fully even in the midst of death.

He certainly created memorable, if messy, lives for the Fisher family.

There was Nate, the handsome free spirit who never wanted to be trapped in his dad's funeral home, his closeted gay brother David (Michael C. Hall), and their mother Ruth (Frances Conroy), who alternated between smothering her family and tryng to escape them.

Outside the Fisher family, there was corpse-restoration wizard Federico Diaz (Freddy Rodriguez), Nate's love interest Brenda (Rachel Griffiths), who came with a truckload of emotional baggage, and David's eventual partner Keith (Matthew St. Patrick), a cop with anger issues.

The acting on Six Feet Under was at a uniformly high level.

An episode in which David got carjacked and nearly killed was one of the most harrowing hours I've ever seen on TV.

Some Six Feet Under fans hated it and you could argue that it marked the show's final descent into an unrelieved emotional darkness.

Still, there was no denying its power.

Just as there is no denyng that Six Feet Under, at its best, was an innovative, even daring, show that created a compelling, complicated view of family life in the shadow of mortality.

RIP.