Seasons
2001 to 2005
Six Feet Under aired on HBO starting in 2001 and helped define its “golden age” of prestige television, which included The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, The Wire, and many more. The show won nine Emmy Awards, three Golden Globes, and a Peabody.
The show is a great example of how a family business drives a show’s narrative. Fisher & Sons Funeral Home is an independent funeral home in Los Angeles. After the patriarch shockingly dies in the opening scene, the family receives a second shock as near-do-well brother Nate is given 50% of the business along with his hard-working, dedicated brother David. As reluctant co-owners, Nate and David are forced to reconcile duty, grief, and identity while sustaining the family business.
Funeral homes have one of the highest rates of multi-generational family ownership of any industry, somewhere between 75 and 90 percent, making the setting a fitting choice for a show about a family business. And there’s a deeper parallel: while the funeral industry deals with death directly, the family business world deals with it indirectly. Succession, intergenerational wealth transfer, family dynamics, and next-generation leadership are defining issues for family businesses, and they are ultimately triggered by the same event, the owner’s eventual death.
Six Feet Under is unflinchingly honest about subjects including grief, addiction, sexuality, faith, and mortality. The show is equally faithful in its handling of family business emotional truths of obligation, resentment, love, and the difficulty of separating identity from inheritance, which track closely with real-world family business truths.
Cast
While the ownership conflict is between Nate and David, the cast includes family and non-family members whose lives are impacted by the family business.
Nate Fisher (Peter Krause) – The elder son had no interest in the business, only to be pulled back in after his father’s death. Nate represents the “reluctant heir”, someone who resents the family business and yet keeps getting drawn back into it, first out of obligation and later as an engaged owner. His ambivalence about the business mirrors his ambivalence about commitment in nearly every other part of his life.
David Fisher (Michael C. Hall) – The younger son is Nate’s opposite: the dutiful, responsible sibling who stayed, trained as a mortician, and quietly kept the business running while Nate was off finding himself. David’s arc is largely about the cost of always being the reliable one, and about reconciling his sexuality, his faith, and his own desires with the identity he’s built around duty.
Ruth Fisher (Frances Conroy) – Nate Fisher, Sr.’s widow is not directly involved in running the business day-to-day, yet she must play the role as the funeral director’s wife. Her own unresolved grief and desire for independence ripple through every operational and family decision the Fishers make.
Claire Fisher (Lauren Ambrose) – The youngest sibling, she has no interest or ownership in the funeral business. She’s an artist, and her storyline tracks her trying to build an identity entirely separate from Fisher & Sons. When her father died, Claire was given a trust fund to pay for college instead of 1/3 interest in the family business. While women are now much more prevalent as owners and operators of family businesses, sexism remains an issue in some family enterprises.
Federico “Rico” Diaz, (Freddy Rodriguez) – The in-house embalmer and eventual junior partner. Rico is the most technically skilled person at the company yet spends much of the series fighting for the recognition and equity that the Fisher sons take for granted simply by being Fishers.
Nathaniel Fisher Sr. (Richard Jenkins) – The patriarch and founder, whose death in a car accident in the pilot episode sets the entire series in motion. He appears throughout the show as a ghost or hallucination, offering blunt, often unsettling commentary to his children as they navigate the business and their lives without him.
Brenda Chenowith (Rachel Griffiths) and Keith Charles (Mathew St. Patrick) are Nate’s and David’s love interests, respectively. As with every in-law or partner, Brenda and Keith are caught in the gravitational pull of the family business.
How Six Feet Under Compares to Real Family Businesses
The Fisher family faces many of the same issues that real-world family businesses face:
- Succession without a plan. Nathaniel Sr.’s sudden death leaves no clear succession plan, and Nate and David are forced to determine roles and authority in real time, a scenario extremely common in small, closely held businesses where founders avoid formal succession planning.
- Roles assigned by birth order and personality, not by choice. David becomes the “responsible” operator and Nate the reluctant one largely because of family dynamics established long before either of them had any say in the business. This dynamic creates long-term resentment for the heirs.
- Blurred lines between home and work. The Fishers literally live above the funeral home, which puts an extra strain on the work/life divide. When Ruth wanted to assert her independence, her first act was to refuse to take phone calls for the business. It’s a boundary many real family enterprises struggle with, where a bad day at work becomes a bad day for the family.
- Non-family talent seeking equity. Rico’s slow fight for partnership reflects a very real tension in family firms: skilled non-family employees who add enormous value but face a glass ceiling because ownership is reserved for people who share a last name.
- Outside pressure to sell or consolidate. The Kroehner Service International storyline dramatizes a genuine threat facing small, independent, family-run businesses across industries — private equity and corporate consolidators offering money and “efficiency” in exchange for the loss of independence and identity.
Why You Should Watch Six Feet Under?
Six Feet Under was groundbreaking because it treated death not as a plot device but as the organizing lens for the entire series. The show examined a flawed, morally messy family to explore grief, sexuality, and identity with an honesty rarely attempted on television at the time.
The show’s trademark opening was a strange, sudden death, ranging from a wife who calmly kills her husband with a cast-iron skillet because he tells the same boring stories to a middle-aged hiker instantly killed by a cougar in the middle of an LA park. After the death scene, they cut to the tombstone graphic, which includes the victim’s name, birth, and death date. The juxtaposition between the morbidly humorous deaths and the stark bareness of the tombstone heightens the sense of life’s fragility.
While the show received tremendous accolades throughout its five seasons, the finale is considered one of the greatest television episodes. It closed with a flash-forward montage showing how every major character eventually dies, decades into the future, set to Sia’s “Breathe Me” — transforming the show’s death-of-the-week structure into one final, sweeping meditation on mortality.
Despite the brilliance of the writing, directing, and acting, the true star of the show is Fisher & Sons Funeral Home, which serves as the gravitational center around which every character orbits…just like in real life.
Allen Esrock is the Founder of NxtGen Nexus, a platform for the next generation of family business owners which is based on his experience of growing up in a family business. Prior to that he started Jitter Fingers, the first safe, social networking website for tween girls and their bffs with Jitter Finger clubs in 12+ countries and 250+ cities in the US.
