Alan Ball makes family unhappiness funny without pretending that the pain is imaginary. Six Feet Under is our strongest reason to recommend his work, with a warning that he sometimes gives brooding more time than it needs.
Fi1m perspective
The Fishers know what is wrong with one another, and still cannot get along. In Six Feet Under (2001), their funeral business keeps ordinary domestic complaints uncomfortably close to grief. We laughed at their failure to put all that self-knowledge to use; Ball finds the comedy in people who can recognise a problem and then repeat it. His mixture of black comedy and psychological drama is unusually assured, and the programme earns the time spent with its exhausting family.
His mid-1990s sitcom writing preceded the breakthrough screenplay for American Beauty (1999), with its attention to suburban dysfunction. Six Feet Under gave him a longer opportunity to examine family life as creator, writer and director. He made his feature directorial debut with Towelhead (2007), adapted from Alicia Erian's novel. True Blood (2008) took him into vampire television; Uncle Frank (2020), which he wrote and directed, returned to family secrets.
For Towelhead, Ball worked collaboratively with actors and used multiple takes to keep options open in post-production. That seems a sensible approach to complicated characters, where a change in delivery can alter how harshly we judge them. The achievement of Six Feet Under is shared, too. Fellow writers Kate Robin, Craig Wright and Nancy Oliver share his interest in people who understand their problems without becoming better at handling them. The sharp ensemble acting makes their behaviour convincing, while the writing allows the jokes to be harsh without dismissing the suffering underneath.
Our reservation is about how long he asks us to stay with unhappiness. Six Feet Under sometimes lets its characters brood beyond the point at which we learn much more about them, and its appetite for psychological scrutiny becomes an indulgence. Yet the funeral business gives even the smaller family complaints a reason to matter: death is part of their working day, and they still have to manage one another. Start with Six Feet Under, and leave some time between visits if the brooding begins to wear.
Biography
Alan Ball is an American screenwriter, director and producer for film and television. He is best known for writing the screenplay for American Beauty (1999), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, and for creating the HBO series Six Feet Under (2001–2005), on which he also served as writer, director and executive producer.
Ball began his career as a playwright before writing for the sitcoms Grace Under Fire and Cybill. He later created and served as showrunner for the HBO series True Blood (2008–2014) for its first five seasons. His other directing and writing credits include the films Towelhead (2007) and Uncle Frank (2020). He has received an Emmy Award and multiple Writers Guild, Directors Guild and Producers Guild awards.
