Six Feet Under Season 1 (2001 Alan Ball)

'Bringing the fun back into funeral!' I'd forgotten those irreverent ads (only in the pilot, unfortunately), and the fades to white, and the fantasy sequences. Ball actually hardly wrote any of them, deigning to supply the last episode. The openings - who will die? - are always brilliant, such as the golf version (stray ball kills old woman in garden).

Apart from Richard Jenkins, no one seemed to acquire star status: Peter Krause, Michael C Hall, Frances Conroy, Lauren Ambrose, Freddy Rodriguez, Rachel Griffiths, Jeremy Sisto.

They're an unlikable bunch of characters, at the outset.. though Nat seems the nicest, and to have the knack of helping their customers - and here we get interesting stories involving the deceased, who are gang members, porn stars, old people, gulf War vets... Certain powerful episodes e.g. dead baby, gay killing.

Also, Nat starts finding out who his father really was... As we start to find out more about them all, behaviours become more understandable.

Thomas Newman wrote the theme.

Shot compositions like this recur throughout all seasons, like it's a house style.

Ball was a writer and story editor on Cybill and Grace Under Fire. Unsurprisingly, he is gay. Holly Hunter and Tim Robbins are in his new HBO show Here and Now.

"Nothing makes me happier than watching a show come together in a way that surprises me. Or getting a script where I don't have to do anything to it. I want this to be fun [Ball] said, then added Maybe I'm just lazier than most people. For much of its five season run, the writer's room could lay plausible claim  to being the happiest in TV.. For the final three seasons the membership of the room remained exactly the same, an almost unheard-of distinction.
In the course of its run, the Six Feet Under's writer's room would include New Yorker cartoonist Bruce Eric Kaplan, the playwrights Rick Cleveland, Nancy Oliver and Craig Wright and the writer Jill Soloway, whom Ball hired on the strength of a short story called 'Courtney Cox's Asshole'."

Excerpts from 'Difficult Men' Brett Martin.