1x02 The Will

[6.8/10] Well, this was an improvement on the pilot at least. One of the big things I’m struggling over with this show is its tone. There’s something about the vibe of the thing that puts me off. “Smug” isn’t the right word exactly, but it’s in the ballpark. There’s this sense that the show thinks it’s profound in what it’s trying to say, when most of what it has on offer is melodrama and trite truisms. There’s nothing wrong with either of those things exactly, but when it seems like the show’s writers think they’re making an Important Statement, it’s hard to warm to those elements.

The theme to “The Will” seems to be whether you ever really know a person and, likewise, whether they can ever really know you, with both questions thrown into sharp relief when someone dies. The most obvious candidate for that comes in the form of the death of the week, a seemingly successful entrepreneur who was, in actuality, sitting on a mountain of debt.

His widow goes from wanting the best of everything to honor the image he projected to the world to peeling jewelry off his corpse in “honor” of the person he actually was. The dichotomy between those two sides of him, and the person left behind forced to reconcile which one she saw and which one she didn’t, presages the various relationships put into focus and tested here.

The least interesting of those continues to be the one between Nate and Brenda. I know I have to cut this show some slack given that it came out in 2001, but this is such a page out of the standard Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Her whole shtick as a massage therapist who psychoanalyzes her boyfriend while offering empty pronouncements and stunts is just the pits. The show wants to wring something interesting out of her having some mysterious past with another “Nathaniel” and a devil may care attitude that makes Nate vulnerable with her, but it’s all just so rote and uninvolving.

That said, I actually like Nate better here than I did in the prior episode. He’s still just a generic aimless cool guy, but the show’s actually grappling with that a little bit. This episode is basically devoted to the idea that all of the Fishers have to untangle their complicated emotions over their deceased patriarch. That’s going to take some time. But one meaningful suggestion here is that Nate didn’t just run away from the family because of how his dad rode him as a kid, but because he just couldn’t psychologically bear to work with dead people. It’s still off-putting to him, so he doesn’t know what he has to contribute. Now that he owns half of the business, he’s struggling even more to figure out what that could look like.

There’s some comedy to his attempts to help (albeit with bits not as strong as the ones in the pilot). He’s not good at picking up bodies because he’s still a little freaked out by “angel lust.” He’s not good at transporting bodies because he’s apt to let them sit in the son for a couple of hours while he drinks wine with his girlfriend. He’s not even great at the logistical side of the business when he tries to “rent” a coffin unaware that reusing them is illegal. It all leads to his dream sequence insecurity that his brother thinks he’s an idiot.

But “The Will” suggests that there’s a place for him here. However good David may be at dealing with dead people, or at least unfazed by them, Nate has a way of dealing with the live ones that could make him an asset to Fisher & Sons Funeral Home (emphasis on “sons”). Whether it’s reassuring the widow or offloading a “rented” coffin, this guy who’s struggled to find direction in his life may potentially find it in the place he tried to run from. That is, again, a little stock, but it’s solid.

That’s less true for Ruth and Claire, who comparatively get the short shrift relative to their male counterparts on the show here, but hopefully they get more focus in future episodes. For Claire, she seemed to hope that the silver lining of her father’s death is that it would at least be her ticket out of here and out of this. Instead, he’s left a trust for her that requires her to either go to college or wait until she’s 25 to collect the money. That feels like a pair of golden handcuffs and imposed expectations to her, which is an interesting story thread. Unfortunately, all we really get out of it in this episode is her getting in deeper with her scuzzy, crystal-smoking boyfriend. We’ll just have to see where this one goes.

Meanwhile, Ruth has the opposite reaction. Her husband left her all his major assets besides the business. Those resources, combined with his absence, give her the freedom to do whatever she wants, only she can’t bring herself to give in to that. She breaks up with her secret boyfriend (Ed Begley Jr.!) and can’t seem to imagine starting over again or selling the business to a chain. All she can do is take a small step like refusing to take dead calls in the middle of the night. Again, there’s an interesting story to be told there, of a button down person redefining their life after a major change, but we only get a whiff of it here.

Once again, however, the best story is David’s. There’s something really powerful to the idea that he continued living a life that he resented and didn’t want because he felt that it was not only his responsibility, but that he would be rewarded for it. To learn, after the will is read, that despite their different paths in life, he’ll have to share ownership of the business with his layabout brother, feels like an insult. Worse yet, as David’s daydream insecurity indicates, he worries that it’s because he’s gay and that his father either thought less of him because of his sexual orientation or at least wanted to hedge his bets in the hopes that Nate would reproduce and keep the business in the family.

David struggling between the life he feels expected to maintain -- one where he runs the family business and makes up with his former fiancee -- versus the one he really wants -- going to law school or following other passions while staying with his boyfriend, is the most potent thread in the show so far. Finding that all his dutiful work goes effectively unrewarded leads him to make the same bad decisions everyone else does here, getting drunk, propositioning his ex, and lying to Keith. (And hey, good for Keith for calling him out!)

But he too is struggling with all of this. There is, again, something very stock about David being reserved and undaunted by dead bodies, but processing his father’s death on the bus that struck his dad, full of regrets, and his brother comforting him there. At the same time, though, it’s a decent sop to the idea that maybe the introverted unknowable dad knew his sons better than they thought, that he believed, maybe even knew, this would bring them together.

That’s a sweet, slanted notion, one that I wish a show with stronger writing and performances (outside of Michael C. Hall) had tackled. That sense of artificiality and network T.V. sheen still lingers over everything, and that tone keeps me from fully investing in even the strongest ideas at play here. But in episode two, Six Feet Under is, ironically, at least on an upward trajectory.