Six Feet Under Season 4

Year: 2004

Grade: D+

Country: USA

Director: Ball

Review

the series gets into real depressing and fatalistic territory in this season. perhaps i’m viewing it without the right point of view. perhaps there was a tongue in cheek quality i missed in this season. perhaps the over-the-top awfulness of the characters here is supposed to be funny. or maybe the creators and writers just hate the characters. i honestly don’t know. how i read it, though, is that these characters whom we have followed for the last 3 seasons are now falling apart even more than ever. they’re either pathetic, grating and annoying (ruth/david) or lack all moral fiber and seem to take themselves far too seriously (claire/nate). it was during this season that i basically stopped caring about the characters because i didn’t see much hope for them. they were devolving, moving backwards, and in a pretty depressing way. some moments were just laughable in their dramatic flair. the end of episode three shows them all having a bonfire in the backyard (in la?!) and staring at it longingly. then clair turns on some radiohead and nate adds his sheets to the fire to cleanse himself of lisa. whatever. nate once again looks for meaning through sex, this time with anna gunn of breaking bad fame, and that goes nowhere (big surprise since that strategy was so successful in the past).

federico falls apart and starts a sort of affair with a stripper. claire gets an orgasm from one of her artsy fartsy friends. david assaults someone and keith has to fix things for him by (what else?) debasing himself sexually.
it’s a real downer of a season and i felt like it just went through the motions.

Watched on TV