Not A Review Of “Six Feet Under”

So not long ago, having recently finished Mr. Robot, a show that, perhaps surprisingly, my wife really liked:

Wife: “Poor Elliot. His life sucks.”*

We started casting around for another program to become or “main course”, a position previously occupied by such luminaries as Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Halt and Catch Fire (my personal favorite, because computer nerds), The Wire, and Treme (but not The Magicians). Someone somewhere recommended another show we missed the first time around, Six Feet Under, so we decided to give that one a try.

Now, the long-time reader (or even just the reader who’s ever seen any of these “Not A Review” posts) may recall that, because I like just about everything, the way we review movies and TV shows around here is by how long they take to put my wife to sleep. No episode of Six Feet Under has ever put my wife to sleep. In fact, she thinks the episodes are too short.

Wife: “What, is that the end?”
Me: “Yep, that’s the end of the episode.”
Wife: “Was it a short one?”
Me (checks episode length): “No, this was a long one, actually. 58 minutes.”
Wife: “It seems like it was only half an hour.”

This has happened several times, where the episode ends just as my wife thinks it was getting started. Always leave ’em wanting more, right?

Wife: “It’s over already?”
Me: “You must really like this show if you think hour-long episodes are too short.”

One interesting thing about Six Feet Under is that … Oh hang on a second:

Now, where was I? Oh, right. One interesting thing about Six Feet Under is that, near the end of Season 1, the more-or-less-main-character, Nate, is in a car accident and hits his head. He seems to be fine, but of course they scan him at the hospital, which turns up something unexpected, so the doctor asks him to undergo another scan, this time with contrast material.

Me: “Contrast material? Uh-oh.”

Contrast material is used when they want to take a better look at your blood vessels to see if you have an aneurysm or other abnormality. In Nate’s case, this turns up an AVM.

Me: “This is 100% accurate. When they find these things before something disastrous happens, it’s almost always because they’re doing a routine scan after an accident or when they’re looking for something else.”

Fun fact: When I was a kid I got hold of a Physician’s Desk Reference (PDR) and read through it, and started thinking I had every condition under the sun (although I don’t remember thinking too much about the one I actually did turn out to have). My wife is well of this little bit of history.

Wife: “You’re not going to worry about this now, are you?”
Me: “Pffft. If I had an AVM, they would’ve found it when they were scanning me eight ways from Sunday.”

Later on, Nate visits the doctor to get treatment options, and it doesn’t go well.

I was pretty impressed with this scene, because one of the treatments mentioned by the doctor—coil embolization, the one I had—was a relatively new procedure back in 2001 or 2002, when it was filmed.

Me: “They actually did their research on this. Good for them.”
Wife: “That doctor has a terrible bedside manner though.”
Me: “Yeah, he needs to talk to Dr. Olson** instead.”

Anyway, partly because of that doctor’s bad bedside manner, Nate has not, so far, sought any treatment for it, so there seems to be a definite possibility of things going pretty badly sideways for him in the future. To quote Aimee Mann:

I won’t find it fantastic or think it absurd
When the gun in the first act goes off in the third.

Aimee Mann, “Frankenstein“

Nate has spent several episodes since then being low-key freaked out and visualizing the ghosts of the family’s customers—they, of course, run a funeral home—as metaphors for his own mortality, most particularly a young football player who died of heatstroke. This ghost hovers in the background, often crying, and keeps exhorting Nate, “Look at me!”, until he finally does. Having seen people in my online groups who have been diagnosed with unruptured aneurysms***, this all rings pretty true to me, as they are pretty uniformly suffering from various degrees of freaking out as well. No doubt I would’ve felt the same if mine had been discovered before it ruptured, even if an aneurysm is one of the few things I didn’t worry about after getting hold of that PDR.

I was much more concerned about a brain tumor.

* And is going to get worse.
** My neurosurgeon, who was awesome.
*** An AVM is not an aneurysm, but they can rupture and cause similarly catastrophic hemorrhagic strokes.