Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For by Kim Akass, Janet McCabe Read Free Book Online Page A

bird. The hill and tree from earlier. The tree puts down roots, forming a box, in which the words ‘ Six Feet Under ’ appear.
    When Six Feet Under creator and executive producer Ball first saw Digital Kitchen’s storyboard for this enigmatic, metaphysical opening credit sequence, he recalls finding it ‘so elegant … so cinematic … so unlike TV ’ (season one DVD commentary; emphasis added). Ball, of course, had become prime mover on Six Feet Under on the strength of his Academy-Award-winning screenplay for American Beauty (1999), and though he was not new to TV (he had written for Grace Under Fire , Cybill and Oh Grow Up prior to attaining auteur status in screenwriting), it should surprise no one, least of all his bosses at HBO, that from the outset he was anxious to distinguish, in the premium channel’s tradition, his series from ordinary television. Even the best makers of television – Buffy the Vampire Slayer ’s Joss Whedon, or The Sopranos ’ David Chase –
    commonly assert their disdain for TV and dream of escaping to greener movie pastures (see Lavery 2002; Lavery and Thompson 2002).
    And yet, as Ball readily acknowledges, the opening title sequence
    ‘transports you into the world of the show …’ (season one DVD
    commentary), which is precisely what the credit sequence of any television series, network or cable, is supposed to do. The ‘Welcome to Twin Peaks’ road sign, the falls, the lake beside which Laura Palmer’s body is found, ‘wrapped in plastic’, transported us to the extraordinary diegesis of Twin Peaks . An eagle’s cry and an inquisitive moose prepared the viewer every week for a visit to Northern Exposure ’s Cicely, Alaska. Tony Soprano’s cigar-chomping drive from New York, past Satriale’s Pork Store, past urban New Jersey, to the front door of his palatial suburban home, ritualistically relocates us for a visit with The Family. These and other memorable televisual opening credits, aided by signature music (Thomas Newman, ‘ Six Feet Under ’, David Schwartz, ‘ Northern Exposure ’, Angelo Badalamenti, ‘ Twin 21
    READING SIX FEET UNDER
    Peaks ’, A3, ‘ The Sopranos ’), have long summoned viewers to step out of their household flow and into one-of-a-kind television worlds (Altman 1986: 43–44). Six Feet Under ’s opening credits may be superb, may be enthralling, may be cinematic, may be HBO, but they are still, at least functionally, TV.
    Executive producer Alan Poul’s understanding of the opening credits, however, takes the matter further. ‘The theme music and title,’ Poul notes, thinking like a producer – like an employee of HBO
    and not just a creator – ‘encapsulate the show so well in a kind of branding way that all you need is the opening chords or the image of the tree and it’s so evocative that people know what you are talking about ’ (emphasis added). Poul’s choice of words is revealing. As Mark Rogers, Michael Epstein and Jimmie Reeves describe in an essay on Six Feet Under ’s big brother The Sopranos , HBO is all about branding.
    (The eras can be distinguished by their dominant forms of marketing: TV I – 1948–1975 – was ‘the age of mass marketing’; TV II – 1975–
    1995 – was ‘the age of niche marketing’; and TV III – 1995 to the present – is ‘the age of brand marketing’ (2002: 48).) Six Feet Under , extremely edgy, very profane, highly sexual, very adult (very much the beneficiary of expanded creative freedom), is designed to help HBO ‘build its brand and attract new subscribers’
    (Rogers et al. 2002: 47). If The Sopranos lends itself more easily to brand marketing, bringing imaginitive life and economic power to its about-to-become-a-cliché slogan (‘It’s Not TV. It’s HBO’), it does so as a representative of a readily identifiable genre: the gangster film; what can be made of the harder to classify Six Feet Under , a series which, like its opening credits, is a strange concoction?
    It’s