Six Feet Under gave me my three-episode rule

by Kona Gallagher

The first episode of 'Six Feet Under' doesn't scream "best show ever!" Luckily, it helped me implement my three-episode rule that made me give it a chance and become a huge fan.

Six Feet Under premiered ten years ago in June. At the time, I was a 20-year-old college student home for the summer. I decided to check out this show, having recently come to believe that HBO knew what it was doing when it came to television. When I saw the pilot though, I was… underwhelmed.

Six Feet Under was a truly unique show. We had never really seen anything like it before – mainly because HBO and other cable stations were really just starting to go wild with their original programming. While this proved to be a great boon for the television landscape, it took some getting used to. HBO truly changed the way we watched TV, but we had to trust it. The pilot for Six Feet Under tested my faith.

Before I wrote this article, I made sure to go back and rewatch the pilot, since I haven’t seen it since its original airing a decade ago. While there were certain details I had forgotten, my memory of the episode held up pretty well. It was weird, it dragged, and the entire Fisher family was kind of off-putting. Plus, there were the commercials – oh, those horrid commercials.

Pushing Daisies would come around six or so years later and do “quirky death” quite well. However, when Six Feet Under tried it, it was nonsensical and took the viewer completely out of the show. The pilot is serious and full of exposition, so it’s not the peppiest, quickest-moving thing in the world. So what do they do? Trim down some scenes? Pick up the pace? Make Claire less annoying so we don’t want to punch her every second she’s on screen? No, they add ridiculous fake ads for funeral home products that bring the show to a screeching halt and dissipate any emotional investment that you may have built up:

Thank god you parodied that GAP ad. I was actually starting to enjoy this show.

While the pilot wasn’t at all what I was expecting, I wasn’t ready to give up on it as I normally would. I figured that The Sopranos had earned the benefit of the doubt for HBO, so I vowed to give Six Feet Under another shot. Plus, Peter Krause, whom I already knew from Sports Night, was already showing brilliance as Nate. So I kept going. The second episode was slightly better, mainly because we got a lot of the exposition out of the way, but by the third episode I was hooked.

It’s then that I learned how weird pilots could be. Sure, some fit seamlessly into the series, but others are awkward and filled with devices or cast members who don’t make it to episode two. If Cougar Town would have kept on chugging along like it did in the first few episodes, it would have lived up to its terrible, shitty name instead of becoming one of the funniest ensemble comedies on TV right now.

Parks and Rec, similarly, went way to Michael Scott with Leslie Knope in the beginning, but quickly corrected its course and is the most brilliant thing ever. Even Parenthood, Peter Krause’s current project, had some trouble finding its voice in the beginning, but is now one of my favorite shows.

Of course, not all shows magically get better after three episodes: Body of Evidence, that Dana Delaney show, sucked just as much mid-season as it did in the beginning, and Off the Map never really came together. However, thanks to Six Feet Under and the three-episode rule it inspired, I’ve become fans of a lot of fantastic TV shows that I wouldn’t have stuck with otherwise.