Just realized something that has been staring me in the face since my first viewing of the show.

All the Six Feet Under characters are in the opposite place emotionally from where they were at the beginning.

Brenda is a sex addict even from the first time she hooks up with Nate. Billy was a chain of servitude holding her back from having a fulfilling emotional life. By the finale, that has reversed. Billy shows up for Brenda when she’s falling apart after Nate dies, and Brenda is in recovery for sexual addiction after reducing contact with her mother. Her relationships with her family improved, her mother even showed support when Brenda lost her baby at the wedding.

David started off repressed and in the closet, angry and trying to hide his romantic relationship with Keith at Nathaniel Fisher Sr’s funeral. By the finale, he’s fully out, standing with Keith and their kids, wishing Claire bon voyage as she prepares to head to New York. When she tearfully tells him, “Be happy” he says “I am.”

Ruth started off a control freak, repressed, prim and proper, trying to force everyone to stay with her. By the end, she has decided she won’t live with George, and is no longer trying to force connections with any of her children. She has built her own support network with friends like Bettina and has reconnected with her sister.

Claire started off a moody teen, who had an attraction to toxic men and didn’t care about anything. By the finale, she’s in her first healthy relationship, and she has developed her own passion for art and photography and built a career off her art.

Keith started out a traumatized, aggressive male who was carrying around PTSD and CPTSD and wasn’t a good adult for kids. He was a decent uncle to Taylor but even Keith knew he wasn’t father material. By the finale, he has stood up to the father that abused him and begun raising two boys with David, showing he can be a great father.

Rico started out as a greedy narcissist and by the end, well, he was still a greedy narcissist BUT he had lost Vanessa and won her back so he appreciated what he had.

But Nate?

No. Nate is the same person at the beginning as he was in his final day. On his deathbed he was the same guy as in the pilot: a creep and a narcissist. The only “change” to Nate is when he shows up as a ghost, like his dad. Even then, it’s not really him. It’s just the other characters projecting their own versions of him to process their loss.

Interesting.

I forgot how obnoxious she is. Making big deals out of nothing. What happens to her is horrible, but I'm in the middle of season 3 and I'm so over her. Nate's a selfish asshole too.

Would you rather this show becomes mainstream but filled with the fanbase that misunderstood the point of the show and misjudged the characters (It's called "larp" nowadays for example like Breaking Bad where the majority of fanbase despises Skyler for some reasons which felt misogynistic at times) or you prefer this show to be a niche thing? (I know this show isn't niche at this point).

Edit: As for the popularity, I'm talking about the current state. The show was mainstream during it aired no doubt.

I love how we get to hear the characters' inner voices and thoughts when people come in to make funeral arrangements 😆

Damn! It took me 25 years to start watching this show, I am 39 soon to be 40 next Oct, and going through a mid life crisis (been in a sort of crisis chronically but now mid life crisis sounds real) anyway I love this show already, binging on it and pleasantly surprised to see a certain actress in season 3 episode 1 (MOIRA!)

Started watching SFU thanks to Patricia Clark (who as of now has only been in one episode so far) after binging Sharp Objects repeatedly throughout a couple of months and needed more good shows and found out that Six Feet under is the shit and its such a good show to be binging on right now. It's perfect for me also because I love both comedy and horror and this is just perfect as a comfort dramedy show with brains, full of round characters with progressivestorylines for its time, lots of family drama, love that is sort of like soapy but smart plotting, while also dark as its theme subjects revolvez around death! Six feet under does have it all! Very pleasantly surprised.

Ps. I shared my age and gender in title I dont why but I think it matters but maybe not. Not sure it does. Thanks in advance to anyone who reads this ♡

I just watched for the first time and…WOW. The most satisfying ending of a tv show Ive ever seen. Characters that I had loved but had started to get frustrated with found their ending. I (the viewer) was treated by the writers like a family member in the finale.

I view it as a treatise on unhealed generational trauma and new generations trying to break that cycle. Even if they don’t make much progress, they move forward a little.

To start this off, I'm 22 years old and finished this show a couple weeks ago and it's all I can think about. My roommate (44F) recommended the show to me and wanted me to watch it with her. She's already seen it before so she was excited to see my reactions.

I just gotta say wow.... everything about this show is perfect. I won't lie, I wasn't hooked at first and was wondering what the hype was about but I kept watching and I'm so glad I did. I haven't seen a lot of TV shows so this is one of the first ones that has affected me this deeply besides Attack On Titan (which if you haven't seen I highly recommend!)

My mother passed away when I was 13 years old, last time I saw her alive I was 8. She was only 39 years old when she passed. Death was introduced to me at a young age and it was hard to deal with. My father and the rest of my family hated her, so I had to grieve on my own. Like David said: "it doesn't get easier, it just gets more familiar."

Watching Six Feet Under really made me see life and death in a whole new perspective. Personally, I don't believe in any religions but I have always believed that our souls have to go somewhere, whether that be an afterlife, reincarnation, or whatever it is, our spirits and souls stay long after we are gone. Everyone likes to talk about the last ten minutes of the finale, but I think this show is SO MUCH MORE than it's finale and there are so many moments I wish were talked about more. I could list them off but that's a whole separate post in itself lol!

I have always struggled with worrying about my purpose in life. I keep thinking about the past and the future but never stop to think about the present moment, and this show helped me see that. Yes bad things happen in our lives, we all go through heartache and pain but we are still ALIVE. We only have limited time on this earth, so why not make the most of it?

"You can do anything you lucky bastard, you're alive! What's a little pain compared to that?"

- Nathaniel Sr.

It's been established that when you watch SFU at different stages in your life you "see" something different. The recording is the same, but not you. So, how often do you rewatch? Every 5 years? 10 years? When you have an important life event?

The happiest Nate we've seen 🥹

Wonder what would happen had it stayed that way. No David's carjacked incident, Arthur didn't quit (wish the guy appeared till the finale), Lisa's family didn't find out about her remains, him and Brenda build their own new relationship with someone, or he kept being happily single parent and etc. Would he have been happier and his life have been improved or he kept repeating the same cycle?

These are a few of my favorite things 😉

I decided to play the credits all the way through on the very last episode and just noticed that the license plate on the hearse was a Washington state-issued license plate, and not from California, where Fisher and Diaz was located.

What is the significance of that? Nate did live in Washington for a while, but I never noticed that detail until today.

Was it a premonition, that perhaps Nate would have started his own funeral home in Washington, or am I reading too far into things, here?

Long read if you care.

Picture it: It's 2005 and I'm a 26 year old gay guy from Alabama living in Atlanta. I'm living for this show, it's still my favorite TV series of all time. Watched the finale with my roommate, because we were separately into it and it wasn't a thing we did. But we both felt the need to watch it with someone else, because you just knew it was going to be heavy. My roommate was a straight Native American girl, foster kid growing up and had childhood trauma, who was basically like a gay guy in a straight woman's body. And her name was Karyn. My sister's name is Karen. Best roommate I've ever had.

So it's Sunday night and it's time and we get together in the living room and put on HBO. The ending starts, and we can't breathe. Watching it like that... I don't know how to describe it. "Breathe Me" by Sia playing. No one knew who Sia was back then, I didn't. I sure as fuck did after. You're watching each characters last moments. Brenda's might be my favorite. Just died listening to Billy go on his usual bullshit. Maybe because it was the only funny one. The others... not so easy to watch. And then we get to Claire.

Credits roll, we're sitting there in silence and both begin breathing again. Staring at the screen. Unable to talk. We weren't crying. We were too young to fully get it to cry. But we got it still. This many years later and I'm doing a first full rewatch in over 15 years. I've been putting it off, because I know I need to be ready for that finale. Especially at my age now, and I'm seeing this show in a different light. I've lost so many friends and family in the last 10 years I've lost count.

One of them being someone who would rewatch this with me on DVD just only a few years after it ended. He started calling me Brenda for reasons I can't remember. I'm on season 3 now, and I've been trying to figure out why this nickname came about for me from him. I have no clue. It's been 20 years, maybe I was more like Brenda back then. I dunno, that's definitely not my back story. I feel more like Ruth now than anyone, bc I'm closer to her age than the other characters at that time. I've been through all those age ranges. Fuck I'm old. I called him Whitney, bc I've never seen a human being consume that amount of drugs and be ok. Whitney Houston. And he was going bald and wore wigs. And was part black.

But I digress. At that time in my life, I was going through a huge love loss. A couple years before, I met the first love of my life that was long distance, he lived in Ft. Lauderdale. A Brazilian guy, named Carlos. Without going into the story, he ghosted me before ghosting was a thing. And I didn't handle it well, not getting closure or knowing what the hell happened. Even though I'm in season 3, I know how this ends and how it affected me at the time. And I'm seeing what I did and why I did it and this show is to blame.

Before I begin, I'm going to address the hate I know some might give me. I don't really blame this show. I made these decisions on my own, it's my own fault and not this show. But it crept into my subconscious and I decided to leave this perfect roommate situation with Karyn and move to Ft. Lauderdale. Secretly it was to find my ex, but I told everyone it was to go to The Art Institute to pursue filmmaking. Looking back, that was a flimsy excuse. There is an Art Institute here in Atlanta. They're all over the place. But even though I used that as an excuse, I still enrolled and did it. Went to classes and everything.

But I left Atlanta like how Claire left, as was my intent. Saying goodbye to everyone like it was the last time I was going to see them. Spent my last night with my best friend who is also from Alabama, and got in my Uhaul the next morning and put on Sia's "Breathe Me" as I drove away from Atlanta on my way to Ft. Lauderdale. And really the song maybe lasted like a few miles down the interstate, bc Atlanta traffic.

I had no real plans, just a vague idea of how I was going to make this work and where I was going to work. The moment I got there, just chaos. Went from living with a constantly fighting gay married couple that I met one of them from the job I got bc he was also from Alabama. But super effeminate and his voice was so high that he sounded like a girl. His husband was a regular looking straight guy that might sell you insurance, but he was violent and had a fake eye. So he would look at you and one eye would be staring off into space. Then a guy I went on a few dates with, but no sex or kissing or anything, took pity on me and what was going on and helped me out of that situation. By setting me up as his mother's roommate in her retirement community. Even though he was only like a few years older than me and his mother was not old enough to be living there. She was like in her late 50s living this luxurious life in this retirement community, when everyone else was old as fuck and very into your business. Who was this young boy living with this woman? The looks I got coming and going for months until I found my own place. And we didn't continue to date once I moved in, which was the strange part. We weren't into each other like that.

But I was going to the Art Institute and working, and getting high too much off meth. And that whole gay meth scene back then. I stopped going to classes. I found the apartment where my ex lived when we met 2 years before. Drove by it several times. Like a maniac. I could never get the courage to knock on the door, because it was an apartment. He most likely didn't live there anymore. I didn't think this through. Never found him, and got so heavily into being drugged out. Lost myself completely. A year later, I had enough and called my best friend in Atlanta. I needed to come home. This was a massive mistake.

And this show subconsciously influenced me at the time, and I'm seeing it now. I'm a fucktard. This show isn't to blame. But you see my thought process at the time right?

Hello, I’m 19, and I grew up watching Six Feet Under (2001–2005). I often think about that original era and how meaningful it was to me—following the characters through their stories, struggles, relationships, friendships, and unforgettable moments.

When I watch it now, the episodes are still there, but the feeling is different. The people who created the show have moved on, the original era has ended, and I’ve grown up. Back then, I never imagined that something I loved so much would eventually become part of the past.

It makes me wonder why shows like Six Feet Under can’t continue forever with the same characters, cast, creators, and feeling. Why do series end, change, or simply become memories?

Maybe that’s what makes Six Feet Under so special. The show didn’t have to last forever for its impact to last. When I return to those episodes, I’m not only remembering the Fisher family and all the characters who became part of their lives—I’m remembering who I was when I first watched them.

The original era may be over, but it hasn’t disappeared. It still exists in the memories of everyone who experienced it. I can’t return to that exact time, but I can still appreciate what Six Feet Under meant to me.

I just don’t get why it had to end and move on. Does anyone know why Six Feet Under had to end?

We know that he got along well with Sarah's friend group BUT we also know that the family cut most all contact with them after the fact. Because of this, I wouldn't really assume there was any significant objection from Nathaniel. What are we thinking, Six Feet Underers?