Love & Death
by Meg Allen
365Gay.com TV

The Fisher family has returned for season three of the HBO hit series Six Feet Under.

The dark saga of the Fisher family and their mortuary in Los Angeles has been a hit with queer audiences since its debut mostly for its groundbreaking multiracial portrayal of a gay couple: David Fisher (Michael C. Hall) and cop-turned-security guard Keith (Mathew St. Patrick).

When we left them last season, David and Keith had broken up. David and Keith continually fought over David's inability to come out of the closet. David did eventually come out and to varying degrees everybody was accepting.

This year, David decides to commit to his relationship and the couple see a counselor. More than any other relationship on the show, theirs is split open and dissected.

"When other kids my age were going to frat parties, I was draining corpses and re-fashioning severed ears out of wax," muses David.

The middle Fisher sibling refers to himself as "the stable one." He joined the family business at the age of twenty, lives in the same house where he grew up.

The first episode is effective as a snapshot -- each character's mental milieu is captured with clarity. This is achieved mostly through the precise writing of show creator Alan Ball.

Ball, who is gay, is one of the most brilliant writers in Hollywood. Crisp and clear, his dialogue is a natural flow of everyday, mundane observations and concerns. No wonder the series has won two Golden Globes (including Best Drama Series) and six Emmy awards.

Alan's first produced feature film screenplay was "American Beauty," for which he received the 1999 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, the Writers Guild of America award for Best Original Screenplay, and the Golden Globe award for Best Screenplay, among others.

Although the show's a serial soap opera at heart, newcomers will settle easily into these curious lives with no problems in the first episode.