In TV, as in life, failure breeds success.
ALAN BALL (creator): My sitcom was on the bubble.
There was a period where people were dropping dead left and right.
Credit: Everett Collection
[Ball’s older sister Mary Ann was killed in a car accident when he was 13.]
Their notes were basically “The whole thing feels a little bit safe.
Could you just make it a little more f—ed up?”
Brooke Nipar for EW
I was like, yes.
After spending so many years in online grid television, I was making everybody safe and nice.
Only about a month and a half went by before I was auditioning forSix Feet Under.
Brooke Nipar for EW
Alan brought me in to read for both Nate and David, and couldn’t make up his mind.
As luck had it, he really liked Michael Hall, who was the perfect choice for David.
So the character of Nate swung my way.
Brooke Nipar for EW
It coincided with the release ofAmerican Beauty[which Mendes directed].
So there was something serendipitous, as far as the Sam Mendes-Alan Ball connection.
LAUREN AMBROSE (Claire Fisher): I was a kid.
Brooke Nipar for EW
I had the feeling that Alan was really rooting for me in the screen test.
I’ve never smoked crystal meth!
I wanted the job so badly.
Brooke Nipar for EW
BALL:I did fear that we would never find our Ruth.
We saw a lot of really talented women, but Ruth is so specific.
She was a woman with a marriage that was essentially dead.
Brooke Nipar for EW
I needed to get another angle, but Frannie had done this amazing feat of emotional nakedness.
I was like, “Frannie, I’m so sorry, but can we do one more?”
She’s like, “Oh, yeah!”
Let me figure that out."
I literally thought that it was written for me.
I had such a crush on Peter.
I used to blush, like, literally every timeI came to set.
FREDDY RODRIGUEZ (Federico “Rico” Diaz): I worked with Alan onOh, Grow Up.
I only did four episodes.
It was a bomb.
But as every episode got worse and worse,American Beautywas released and became a phenomenon.
The sitcom is canceled, but Alan wins an Oscar.
About a week later, I get the script forSix Feet Underand thought, “That’s odd.
I was just at his house and he didn’t mention anything.”
We were hailed in our community as groundbreakers.
But for the most part, it was an imaginative leap.
KRAUSE: It was one of the most perfectly cast families on television.
You just bought that Richard and Frances would have these exact three kids.
CONROY: People watched the show in tribes, it seemed.
The story brought a sense of community in the telling each week.
The audience could identify with at least one of the characters in each episode.
AMBROSE:Claire was Alan’s proxy in writing the story.
He was the youngest in his family, and he had a lot of Claire in him.
HALL: I feel like viewers rooted for David and Keith.
They definitely had the most stable relationship.
[EW was unable to reach St. Patrick for an interview.]
GRIFFITHS:America wasn’t in a conversation about death.
Human frailty was not at the forefront of the American conversation.
If anything, we were at a moment where we were hurtling toward this toxic masculinity.
There was not a lot of room to say, “I’m not coping.”
BALL:I picked Los Angeles [as the setting] because it was familiar.
But it also felt like the world capital of death denial.
And yes, it still exists.
We were trying to stay one step ahead.
HALL:The woman who sees the blow-up dolls floating and thinks it’s the Rapture!
AMBROSE:There was the one where the toilet ice falls out of the airplane.
It was so bizarre.
CONROY:That number of deaths over a five-year span is a lot of mortality to deal with.
Over its four-year run,Six Feet Underwon nine Emmys, including a best directing win for Ball.
Initially, though, Ball wasn’t sure how he would end theSix Feetsaga.
BALL:Somebody in the writers' room just said, “We should just kill everybody.”
We should go into the future for that."
I was just like,Of course.
There’s no other way for the show to end.
That’s the pointof the show.
Your life can be taken away from you at any moment.How are you going to live your life?
Sia, who we’d never heard of, was discovered in that montage of everybody dying.
[Sia’s song “Breathe Me” plays over the sequence.]
BALL:We didn’t want all of [the deaths] to be funny.
We wanted them to all be meaningful and honor the character.
AMBROSE:It was this long wake and funeral that we had to shoot.
CONROY :It was difficult to be in all the scenes.
It was so strange and vacant and lonely.
The last 15 minutes of the story took everything to a surreal level of heightened reality.
I couldn’t bring myself to look at Ruth as she was made to appear in her final moments.
I had to give myself that leeway and inhabit her without seeing how she was made to appear.
If there was ever a spin-off, I would imagine it would happen in that period.
What do you think the spin-off should be?
Federico did go off and start his own funeral home, you know.
KRAUSE:I think everyone who worked on the show started reexamining how they were living their lives.
Now with this pandemic, everybody has the opportunity to examine how they’re living their life.
The isolation that everybody’s experiencing is unprecedented, certainly in our lifetimes.
It’s really interesting what we want to watch during a pandemic.
It’s a privilege to be part of something that is still being talked about.
BALL:It was successful enough, although at the time the audiences weren’t that big.
It didn’t really get huge numbers.
But critics and people liked it.
And once it started showing around the world, it really became somewhat of a phenomenon.
You know how it is in Hollywood: You’re as good as your last thing.
So for a while, I was a golden boy.
But then I made a movie that tanked, and I was no longer the golden boy.
People always tell me it’s the best ending to a series ever.
This show felt like it lived the amount of time it was supposed to live.
A version of this story appears in the March issue ofEntertainment Weekly,on newsstands now andavailable here.
