Gripping story with well-crafted characters

An absolute waste of money

A Brilliant Conflict

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

I have seen all major TV series: Sopranos, Wire, Breaking Bad, Games of Thrones, Mad Men, Downton Abbey etc etc etc.. and this is the best show of them all without hesitation. This is an excellent drama about relationships, family, life and death. After having watched this series you will be a slightly different and better person. Don't miss this great opportunity! Don't be held back that this is an older series, invest your time and you will be greatly rewarded for doing so.Everything else about this series has been said in the reviews below. This is my first review on IMDB and I just felt I needed to post one after having watched this series, and hopefully bring some more attention to this fantastic masterpiece.Put this on the top of your list and start watching asap !

I absolutely loved seasons 1 and 2, they were clever, with the right mixture of dark humor and drama, the characters were still interesting, and the stories were entertaining. However, at some point in season 3 things began to go downhill, character development started to go nowhere. I grew sick of the characters, especially Nate and Brenda, everyone became a narcissistic sex-addict asshole, they cheated on each other all the time, argued all the time, and complained and whined about everything, to the point there was no one to root for. The show turned in an unbearable soap opera with characters that weren't likable at all. There were glimpses of quality in season 4 and 5, but the clever writing wasn't there anymore, and most of it felt like filler, unfortunately.

Liked this show for the most part, thought season two was substantially better than season 1, but there was something I just didn't like. I reviewed all the characters in my head and all the Fishers were fine- they each were compelling actors that held their own interest and problems in an engaging way. And then I looked at Brenda and her family and realized why something seemed off.For starters, they said she has a 180 IQ. That's ridiculously high, photographic memory and physics genius level, and at first, when she was being her flirty / flighty self she seemed at least brilliant, and I've always had a fascination for the genius types. But as the relationship with Nate got more serious and she became more her sullen / depressed / morose self, any real brilliance seemed to disappear and she seemed like an intelligent but thoroughly average neurotic person. My guess is that anyone with an impossibly high IQ like that would be an insatiable book reader, possibly endlessly creative (not all genius types are, some are more academic than creative), but in any case a force to be reckoned with, not this soppy character that Brenda turned into when things got real. What throws all of this over the top for me in just plain rejecting her and her family as anything I want to subject myself to, is seeing how depressingly horrible her family is, esp the mother, and in complicity, the father. I unfortunately watched one of the season 2 episodes before going to sleep last night and had the most awful sense of depression, having the example of the mental cruelty and obliviousness that the parents exhibit, passing their sickness to their children, and the helplessness that Brenda struggles with in not knowing how to move past it. I really can't believe the mother character, matricide would be a fitting end for her. It gave me some consolation that the Billy character seemed grounded and not caught in the miasma after being detached from the family when in the hospital and getting good help.Plain and simple I don't consider that entertainment or worthwhile on any level to see that level and kind of dysfunctionalty. It could be argued that if it upsets me this much and triggers my own sense of depression and helplessness that it's good writing/acting. But for the same reason I don't watch horror movies or anything that depicts unusually cruel and detached and sick people, I don't need that example in my brain. It's not as bad as witnessing violence first hand but it's a close second.Thumbs down to to the producers that felt they needed this kind of awfulness to "make it real" and be attractive to an American audience that is presumably jaded unless shocked. As it is, I'm not watching anymore of the second season or beyond, which is a shame.Otherwise, all the reflections on death, growing up and old, relationships, etc., I thought were well done and worth the watch.

Yes, Six Feet Under is the best show I've ever seen. Better than Breaking Bad, The Wire, The Sopranos, Game Of Thrones and the other top contenders. The truth is that with only an 8.8 on IMDb I expected it to be entertaining, but I was blown away by this show. In fact I passed over this show many times because the premise didn't sound all that attractive to me. A family living in a funeral home? *Yawn* - or so I thought. While many of the greatest shows pull you in with exciting story lines centering around money, power, intrigue, and violence, this series is a creature of it's own. It focuses instead on the beauty of life and death, and all the struggles we endure as individuals. The result of this is a show that touched me like no other; a show that brought new perspective to life. It's difficult to find the right words to express how incredible this show is. The simplest way to put it is to affirm that Six Feet Under is the best show I've ever seen, and I would recommend it to anyone.