Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For

by Mark Lawson, Kim Akass, Janet McCabe

Overview

Praised for its unabashed portrait of the 'death care' industry, HBO's 'Six Feet Under' is less about the business of death than the art of living well. It was created by Alan Ball ('American Beauty') and centres on a Pasadena undertakers run by two brothers, with their mom and teenage sister making up the dysfunctional family quarter. This innovative, controversial show charts difficult territory, from death, dying and bereavement, to female and gay sexualities, laying bare in the process an American cultural consciousness. 'Six Feet Under' first aired among HBO's 'must-see' Sunday night line-up in 2001, going on to establish itself as a critical and ratings winner. This book on the groundbreaking show examines such themes as the modern sacred and profane, pornography and the dead body, magic realism and the grotesque, American cultural politics, self-help culture, family relationships, homosexuality and re-thinking the closet, the church and gay politics, motherhood and teenage rebellion. Entertaining and enlightening in equal measure it contains a complete episode guide to the first four series of 'Six Feet Under'.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781850438090
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	06/22/2005
Series:	Reading Contemporary Television
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.78(w) x 8.16(h) x 0.73(d)

About the Author

Janet McCabe is Lecturer in Film Studies at Trinity College, Dublin Kim Akass is a writer and editor; she is, with Janet McCabe, Series Editor of Tauris' Reading Contemporary Television Series and is on the Editorial Board of the Critical Studies in Television jourbanal. She is co-editor, with Janet McCabe, of Reading 'Sex and the City', Reading 'Six Feet Under', 'Reading 'The L Word', Reading 'Desperate Housewives'and Quality TV all published by I.B. Tauris.

Table of Contents

Foreword. Mark Lawson. "Why do people have to die?" "To make contemporary television drama important, I guess"
• Introduction: Part 1: Memento Mori: Spectacle, the Specular and Observing the Dead
• Exquisite Corpse: Death as an Odalisque and the New American Gothic in Six Feet Under--Mark Bundy
• It's Not Television, It's Magic Realism: The Mundane, The Grotesque, and the Fantastic in Six Feet Under--David Lavery
• The Sacred and Profane: The Crisis of Ritual in Six Feet Under--Rob Turnock
• Sex, Shocks and Stiffs: Six Feet Under and the Pornography of the Morbid.--Lucia Rahilly
• Part 2: Mourning and Melancholia: American Cultural Crisis and Recovery
• Buried Lives: Gothic Democracy in Six Feet Under--Dana Heller
• American Gothic: the Funeral Parlour, Family Values and the Use of the Gothic.--Mandy Merck
• Queer and Six Feet Under: Mourning after AIDS--Robert Tobin
• Americanistis: Self Help and the American Dream in Six Feet Under--Ashley Nelson
• Part 3: Fisher Kings (and Queens): The Family Reconsidered
• Mother Knows Best: Motherhood in Six Feet Under--Kim Akass
• Fisher's Sons: Brotherly Love and the Spaces of Male Intimacy in Six Feet Under--Joanna di Mattia
• "Like, Whatever": Claire, Female Identity and Growing Up Dysfunctional--Janet McCabe
• Part 4: Undertaking New Identities: Subjectivities in Transition
• Writing the Epitaph: Death Anxiety, Existential Heroism and Six Feet Under--Katherine and Anissa Wardi
• Desperately Seeking Brenda: Essentialist Notions of Subjectivity in Six Feet Under--Erin McLeod
• Queering the Church: Sexual and Spiritual Neo-Orthodoxies in Six Feet Under-- Brian Singleton
• Revisiting the Closet: Reading Sexuality in Six Feet Under--Samuel Chambers
• POETRY: Peter Wilson
• Episode Guide
• Bibliography
• Index.