Any predictions for what’s going to happen tonight?
As David’s fears take over, Keith tries to protect him – and the boys; Billy attends to his sister; Claire goes on a drunken harassment spree and pushes Ted away; Rico pushes for a talk about the business; George tries to help Ruth with Maya; Nate urges Brenda to embrace a taboo; and Vanessa sees the future in a funeral home.
“Now I walk around all the time feeling like everybody’s gonna humiliate and murder me.”
“A North Carolina native and graduate of New York University’s Master of Fine Arts program in acting, Michael Hall has appeared in nearly a dozen major stage productions. Hall’s film credits include John Woo’s PAYCHECK and the independent drama BEREFT, which premiered April 5 on Showtime.”
Mortuary Fact
In 1999, the cremated remains of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and LSD advocate Timothy Leary were launched into orbit on a Spanish research satellite.
I have no idea what’s going to happen–and I can’t wait!! 20 minutes to go. . .
Ok, I’m glad I checked in here. I found out about Nate’s death here last time prior to the west coast viewing. Now I’m ready to go for the HBO-E showing.
I can’t shake the hunch that all of the Fishers will be killed off before the end of the finale. It would fit perfectly into the morbid world of the show. I have never missed an episode, it’s a great escape to shadowland. </creepy comment>
I’m just like you … i’ve never missed an episode. And this season has been SO GOOD that I am really, really sad it is ending.
Wonderful acting and such quirky scripts. Last week’s show, for example, could have been such a drag like the de riguerre “family mourns,” “family says things about deceased one,” etc… but it was very funny at moments.
And David’s terror was utterly real to me, as was his disconnect. He was unable to tell a single soul what he was seeing and feeling inside.
Btw, we’re getting 20 episodes of The Sopranos, but it won’t start until January 2007. Jesus.
January 2007! Damn! I love the Sopranos, but that is too long to wait.
How are they gonna explain how Tony Jr. has aged 5 years?
now I’m refreshed and ready to face another week 🙂
I just loved it…. 75 minutes next week! WOW!
The first part … the soldier who lost three limbs. Of course, I thought of Max Cleland. And then I thought what his sister did was a beautiful thing because it was what he wanted so much. And it showed that, no matter how nobly a few people can live after such a devastating injury, most have a terrible, terrible time. And what he did has no shame in it.
And Claire’s drunken attack on the mother’s SUV and her “Support the Troops” bumper sticker…
Say, do you like “Entourage”? I get a huge kick out of it … do not care for the show that follows, altho Darcy’s a big fan.
Darcy and i are crazy about Ari on “Entourage” — he’s stealing the show.
Ari is hilarious. I love Entourage, but it was too short tonight. And I can’t stand Phoebe’s show.
the soul quite like it; aside from Alias.
Have never once watched Alias. Darcy rented the season DVD and really got into it …
should i start watching it this fall?
P.S. Have any of you heard any buzz about HBO’s new Rome series? Here’s hoping it fares better than “Troy” or “Alexander.”
I tried jumping into Alias midseason last year and couldn’t do it. My roommate had Season 1 on DVD so I went back and watched them. I was hooked and had to go buy Season 2 when I was done. It’s helpful to know the backstory, because it’s James Bond crossed with DaVinci Code. They are working her pregnancy into the storyline so let’s see how they manage the stunts.
Sunday, Aug. 14, 2005
Tearing Off the Togas
HBO’s bloody, steamy epic Rome doesn’t break new ground, but it slings some impressive-looking dirt
By JAMES PONIEWOZIK
The secret to some of the best HBO series is dirt. Not filthy language, not nudity–actual dirt. The muck in the streets of Deadwood, Tony Soprano’s soldiers exhuming an incriminating body, the Fisher family tossing shovelfuls in the grave as Six Feet Under buried its lead character Nate–all this soil embodies the network’s insistence on deprettifying its subjects.
So when HBO set out to make a drama about Rome in the time of Julius Caesar, Job One was to dirty up the Eternal City. Rome (Sundays, 9 p.m. E.T., debuts Aug. 28) eschews the popular white-marble myth. “Part of the brief was to create an image of Rome nobody has seen before,” says executive producer Frank Doelger. Historic Rome, he says, was a teeming capital full of color, pornographic graffiti and coed public latrines. It was crowded, relentlessly commercial (a town crier’s announcement in one episode ends with an ad for a flour miller) and, above all, filthy. Instructing the set designers, says Doelger, “I told them to think about India–Bombay or Calcutta.” It’s as if you don’t just see this Rome, you smell it.
That squalor did not come cheap. The set alone, at Rome’s Cinecittà studio lot, cost $13 million and the 12-episode first season, $100 million. Shooting began in March 2004 but was delayed as HBO shuffled producers and reshot chunks of the first three episodes (directed by filmmaker Michael Apted). It also had the largely British cast drop the regional accents they had used to distinguish the classes, deeming them too inscrutable for Americans.
The completed Rome is still a class-conscious story, splitting focus between historical figures and hoi polloi. Its overarching story is the power struggle between Caesar (Ciarán Hinds), who has just defeated the Gauls, and his onetime friend Pompey Magnus (Kenneth Cranham). Season 1 traces Caesar’s rise to power and the events leading to his assassination. (None of this should be a spoiler, unless the educational system has truly failed us.)
We follow the events through the eyes of Lucius Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) and Titus Pullo (Ray Stevenson), two lower-class soldiers in Caesar’s 13th Legion. This plebeian odd couple–Pullo’s a rogue, Vorenus a by-the-book prig–offer grounding and some nicely turned comic relief, as when Pullo, jailed for disobeying an order, petitions Forculus, a Roman god of doors. “I will kill for you a fine white lamb,” he promises. “Or failing that–if I couldn’t get a good one at a decent price–then six pigeons.” But the scripts resort to contrivance and coincidence to keep the pair at the center of events. In Episode 2, a confrontation that precipitates Caesar’s coming to power turns out to have been caused by a bar brawl Pullo got into. It’s all a bit too Forrestus Gumpus.
What we want most from Roman drama is good old pagan decadence, and Rome hears our prayers. There are bloody rituals, lewd pantomimes and a show-stealing turn by Polly Walker as Atia, Caesar’s scheming niece; with her flaming red hair and willingness to trade sex for power, she’s like a Latin version of The O.C.’s villain Julie Cooper. The series humanizes figures we know as marble busts: Caesar is a calculating pol, Mark Antony (James Purefoy) a narcissistic ass and Octavian (Max Pirkis)–Atia’s son and the future Caesar Augustus–a precocious boy with a gift for Machiavellian strategy. The aim is to take those historical giants off their pedestals. “Nothing changes that much,” Stevenson tells TIME. “Politicians will always be politicians.”
The main failing of Rome, a BBC co-production, is that it is more like an expensive I, Claudius than a work of HBO iconoclasm. The visuals are staggering–you see every penny spent–but cosmetic changes aside, it does not rethink its genre as, say, Deadwood did the western. At heart, it is largely a history-book story with familiar themes, enacted by regal men with British accents. One has to wonder what HBO would have had if it had let Deadwood creator David Milch do the more unusual series he once proposed: a drama about ancient Roman city cops.
There are worse things than being unsurprisingly good, though, and after a slow start, Rome’s lusty intrigue draws you in to this gorgeously corrupt, dirty city. Just mind where you step. –With reporting by Mimi Murphy/Rome
Copyright © 2005 Time Inc. All rights reserved.
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Sounds pretty damn good to me. It sounds like they did some rethinking, despite what the writer says.
I hear Forrestus Gumpus was quite popular among the masses.
Me bad. Posting the entire LATimes Aug. 15 article:
Sorrow is sweet as show dies
The creator of “Six Feet Under” is pleased with what his series has said about death and grief.
By Greg Braxton
Times Staff Writer
August 15, 2005
The mourning has finally broken. Alan Ball is contemplating life after death — five seasons’ worth.
Ball is coping with the final throes of HBO’s “Six Feet Under,” his black-humor-laced drama about a family-run funeral home that will end its run Sunday. “Six Feet Under” is one of the flagship components, along with “The Sopranos,” “Sex and the City” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” that have made the pay-cable network a critical favorite and powerhouse.
The 48-year-old Ball, who scored an Oscar for writing “American Beauty,” is very much alive and kicking as he prepares to tackle new projects, including a play, a couple of screenplays and a novel he is adapting for a film he hopes to direct later this year.
For Ball, who says his characters are so real to him they haunt his dreams, fading out “Six Feet Under” is a mixed blessing.
“It’s like having seven kids, and they all go off to college at the same time,” Ball said in an interview. “This show is very dear to me. I’m letting go of something that felt very safe and familiar. It’s definitely bittersweet, a growth experience, and not without some pain. But I’m really excited about moving on and doing something different.”
The show’s signature opening sequences — the mostly untimely demise of a future client of the Fisher family mortuary — spotlighted its exploration of how the living deal with the complicated layers of grief. The dramatic odyssey of “Six Feet Under” has been sprinkled with generous doses of sex, violence, surrealism and emotional turmoil.
Throughout the series, Ball and the writers did not shy away from pushing the envelope. One installment last season revolving around the brutalization of David, one of the Fisher brothers, provoked such outrage that some fans swore never to watch the series again. And Ball saved his most shocking twist for this season, killing off one of the series’ lead figures — Nate Fisher (Peter Krause), the handsome, conflicted co-director of the funeral home — with three episodes left in the season, no less.
Fisher collapsed into open-eyed unconsciousness just minutes after cheating on his pregnant wife, Brenda (Rachel Griffiths). His subsequent death and the Fishers’ grief in burying one of their own — their emotions ranging from tenderness to rage — has fueled emotional discussions in TV chat rooms and around water coolers.
Addressing the overall theme and meaning of “Six Feet Under,” Ball paused.
“What the series is all about is: We die,” Ball finally said. “So while we’re here, let’s live fully. There are lots of things that masquerade as having the key to life — religion, culture. But ultimately we have to make decisions on our own. And we will make mistakes. And that’s OK, because we’re human. It’s a struggle to find meaning, but that struggle is the meaning.”
Much of Ball’s inspiration for the series was based on a painful adolescent memory. His sister was killed on her 22nd birthday in a traffic accident while driving the 13-year-old Alan to a piano lesson. Ball recalled the funeral and how his mother reacted as she approached his sister lying in an open casket.
“My mother leaned forward, kissed my sister on the forehead and started to weep,” Ball said. “One of the funeral directors gently guided her away from the casket and took her behind a curtain. The implication was that grief is ugly and shouldn’t be seen, it’s so personal. But we need to know that everyone feels the same way.”
A TV veteran, Ball previously wrote for series such as “Grace Under Fire” and “Cybill.” But “Six Feet Under” evolved in ways that surprised even him.
“When I wrote the pilot, I was in an intense state of mind,” he recalled. “I had had another show canceled, and I was exhausted. I knew HBO was interested in a show about a funeral home, I was two years into my TV deal, and I didn’t want to write another network sitcom. I wanted to exorcise some demons while opening as many doors as possible. Although I had some ideas about what this show should be, it really became an entity of its own. I had to realize where the show wanted to take us and get out of its way.”
Killing off Nate was part of that process. In Ball’s mind, the character was doomed since the third season when he became afflicted with arteriovenous malformations, a brain disorder.
“Nate was always moving a step closer toward his own mortality. I got a lot of resistance from the other writers, but I always felt that nothing was as organic or as appropriate as Nate dying. And I didn’t want to do that in the final episode. I wanted to have the Fishers grieve, to have them go through that loss and come out the other side. Life isn’t about happy endings.”
Despite the show’s devoted fans, continuing bravos from critics and a mountain of Emmy nominations, some observers believe it has been overshadowed by its HBO brethren.
Tim Brooks, co-author of “The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows,” said, “The audience for ‘Six Feet Under’ is very loyal, but the show has never had the breakout appeal of ‘The Sopranos’ or ‘Sex and the City.’ “
Brooks noted some of the criticism from fans last season for the episode in which David picked up a man who claimed to be out of gas and needed help. Though David thought his passenger might be game for some casual sex, the man turned on him and proceeded to terrorize him — robbing and beating him, forcing him to take crack, putting a gun in his mouth and threatening to set him on fire after dousing him with lighter fluid.
Instead of backing away from that episode, Ball has continued to refer to it in subsequent installments, notably the one with Nate’s funeral, when David was nearly paralyzed with fear by visions of his assailant.
“I try to reflect life as much as I can,” Ball explained. “When you are traumatized, it stays with you the rest of your life. To gloss over that would be a disservice. People don’t want to look at what’s painful. But it’s dysfunctional to deny the impact.”
Putting together the final episodes was a cathartic experience for the cast and crew, Ball said. “Yes, it was painful, but all of us love these characters so much it wasn’t hard to access the feelings we needed to do the shows. Lauren Ambrose [who plays Fisher sibling Claire] told me that I made it possible for her to grieve the end of the show. All of those feelings were right there.”
Fans hoping for revivals of “Six Feet Under” would be, well, dead disappointed. Ball promises that the end of the show really will be the end.
“I don’t think you’ll be seeing a Fisher family reunion or ‘The Fishers Go to Hawaii,’ ” he said. “This is the final chapter.”
My hunch grows stronger after reading this.
I’m still mourning the fact that I’ll never know if Sophie really raised the preacher, or see how the troop carries on without Jonesey, or see what Ben does next.
Please, someone, do a “Serenity” on this one.
DID THEY CANCEL IT?!?!? Please God, nooooo
Yes, darn it.
The child of light and the child of darkness shuffle off into the dusty shadows. And we never get to Trinity.
the horror…