Review by Kathryn Flett, Observer/Guardian
If, (compared to BIG BROTHER), it's genuinely entertaining and intelligent black comedy you seek, thank the lord for Six Feet Under (C4's latest import from the most excellent HBO channel). HBO are, of course, purveyors of The Sopranos, in which we learn a great deal about the not-so-niceties of human waste disposal, and Sex and The City, which focuses on the minutiae of female emotional waste disposal in the form of sex, tears, shopping. Here, though, is the waste disposal show to, as it were, end 'em all, written by American Beauty screenwriter Alan Ball and set in a funeral parlour run by your average middle-American dysfunctional family, who have recently been made all the more dysfunctional since dad came to a messy end in a brand new 'funeral coach'.
So, 'the new hearse is totalled and your father is dead', Mom tells the prodigal son, Nate, who is on his way home for Christmas and indulging in a little festive shagging in an airport broom cupboard en route. His sister, Clare, learns the tragic news while high on crystal meth (or is it crack?), while the 'sensitive' closeted brother, David, who already works in the family business, copes with his loss in the arms of a suitably drop-dead gorgeous cop.
Pitched somewhere in-between the Osbournes and the Addamses, the Fishers are, on first impressions, a delightfully unlikeable bunch of caricatures - though if I had a minor criticism it would be that the attention-grabbing wackiness is laid on a wee bit self-consciously thick: deadpan ain't the word for the delivery of dialogue like: 'I have to go and identify our dead father's body. I'm sorry you're having a bad drug experience but go deal with it' or 'other kids my age were going to frat parties, I was draining corpses and refashioning severed ears out of wax.' But it's still a wonderful slice of droll classiness from HBO, who can do no wrong. Probably the only person who could pull off as dark and funny a comedy about British funeral parlour would be Caroline Aherne.