Associated Press, July 19, 2001
Alan Ball knows sooner or later he will die. But even as he lives each day all too wise that it might be his last, he claims no special insight into the hereafter.
``I'm just as afraid of death as the next guy,'' he declares.
Of course, other guys didn't win a best-screenplay Oscar for ``American Beauty,'' the 1999 drama narrated by its protagonist from beyond the grave.
Now Ball revisits death with his latest creation, ``Six Feet Under,'' the HBO series about a family of morticians. It airs Sunday at 9:30 p.m. EDT.
Borrowing an office at HBO headquarters for a chat, Ball explains that the initial concept for ``Six Feet Under'' wasn't his. It emerged during a chance conversation with an HBO exec in late 1999.
Shortly afterward, Ball's brand-new sitcom ``Oh Grow Up!'' - about three college chums who share a house in Brooklyn - met its doom (sense a theme here?) at the hands of ABC.
``I was exhausted and depressed,'' recalls Ball, who before that had written for ``Grace Under Fire'' and ``Cybill.'' Weighing his next move, he concluded that ``I just couldn't go back into that four-camera, laugh-track sitcom world.''
So he wrote on spec a pilot script for what would become ``Six Feet Under'' - and pre-emptively, even perversely, devised it ``in a way that could only be done on HBO.''
What he wrote gave birth to the Fishers, who live over the mortuary they have owned and operated for decades in a now-faded section of Los Angeles.
``I wanted it to be a show about life in the presence of death,'' Ball says. And, like life, it's a rich blend of sadness, absurdity, grief, love, faith, sex and, yes, death - not to mention fate's desultory intrusions.
As research, Ball visited morgues and preparation rooms. But he also was enriched by Thomas Lynch, the Michigan funeral director and writer whose books include ``Bodies in Motion and at Rest.''
``Lynch writes about his experiences with such honesty and grace that it's really sort of humbling,'' says Ball, ``and that particular tone is the one that spoke to me the most, in terms of what the series has become.''
What the series became is a darkly funny saga that welcomes opposing points of view, even conflicting realities, while coming to few verdicts about right and wrong.
This is a series that lets one of its principals declare dead seriously: ``It's more than just a casket, it's a tribute.'' Then leaves it at that. A series that fades not to black at a scene's conclusion but, hopefully somehow, to white.
Most of all, ``Six Feet Under'' is a series plunging into the oceanic depths of a subject largely unexamined elsewhere by TV drama, despite - like the unexplored oceans - death's domineering presence in our world.
Despite its offbeat subject matter, this isn't a niche show. Everything else is a niche show. ``Six Feet Under,'' arguably, is the main event. And already it has won a new lease on life: HBO has picked up the series for a second season of 13 episodes.
``It pretty quickly acquired its own life,'' says Ball, ``and that's when I started to say, `OK, let's now get out of the way and let it become what it's going to become. Because it will let us know.' And it has. Of course, that could just be rationalization for my own laziness.''
He erupts with a laugh.
Ball, 43, grew up a gay kid in conservative Marietta, Ga., where he says being gay, at least openly, ``just wasn't an option. I had to move away from where I came from to discover who I was.''
Now a Los Angeles resident, Ball is challenging his viewers to confront the mysteries that, in making ``Six Feet Under,'' have become part of his quest.
``In our culture, we're pretty squeamish about death. We like to cover it up. So, what if you're the person who deals with it for everybody else?
``Are you depressed? Are you weirdly liberated? Do you think about spiritual things more or less than other people do? How does it affect you and your own life, and how you see the world?''
In short, the people who do death for a living serve as a window for Ball to probe death's role in all our lives. But if he has any answers, he isn't tipping his hand. Nor is he taking a stand. ``It's not that simple,'' he says.
Despite the easy target morticians make for jokes and even scorn, Ball argues that ``we have a need for some sort of ritual to help us make the psychic transition from life with the loved one, to life without the loved one. And we need someone to help us do that.''
On the other hand, don't look for Ball to be buried six feet under. ``I intend to be cremated,'' he says with an uneasy laugh.
Frazier Moore, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel