Classic tv: Six Feet Under, Season 5

 I have this horrible habit of buying whole seasons of tv shows I’ve never seen because I don’t want to wait for Netflix to send them one disc at a time (even though I’m actually a really slow tv watcher). So I bought the whole series of Six Feet Under after falling in love with the first few episodes last summer. I found the show, about a family of funeral directors, to be really quite powerful. The Fishers, the show’s central dysfunctional family, should be annoying, but the writing and acting is so deft that I ended up sympathizing with all of them.

But now that I’m in the middle of the fifth season, I’m now facing the fact that once it’s over, I’ll have five seasons worth of DVDs that I’ll never watch again. The downhill slope really started for me sometime around season four, when David was abducted and tortured for a whole episode. I can’t even articulate why, but that particular hour of television almost made me stop watching the show altogether. But I’ve stuck it out and so far continue to be disappointed.

Now that the show is almost done, all of those incredibly flawed but still well-rounded and sympathetic characters are now downright unlikable. In season one, the only characters I downright disliked were Brenda and Keith. Now, everyone has done a 180. Keith and Brenda are fine, but everyone else (with the exception of David—who is forever awesome) is completely awful—I’m looking at you, Claire, Ruth, Rico, and Nate.

I’m all for complex, dynamic characters, but when most of your cast loses everything that makes them human or relatable, your show has a real problem. And it’s pretty sad to think that I’m actually relieved to be nearing the end of what was once a really great show—and the prospect of getting rid of all those damn discs.