This article examines the widely acclaimed and discussed television serial Six Feet Under, created by Alan Ball. As its title suggests, Six Feet Under deals openly, and sometimes shockingly, with death, by following the lives of the Fisher family, in and out of their Los Angeles funeral home/residence, and of the people who gravitate around them. After calling attention to the possible sources of Six Feet Under and its indebtedness, in terms of tone and structure, to other television genres (such as the soap opera and the situation comedy), the article analyzes the serial’s treatment of the theatrical quality of the “funeral business”. The second part of the article focuses on the representation of gender in the serial, as it emerges from the characterization of the Fisher brothers and their widowed mother, and the search for beauty in the unlikely setting of a funeral home, through the figures of budding artist Claire Fisher and master mortician Federico Diaz.
