Myspace Layouts - Image Hosting - Comments
The show stars Peter Krause as Nathaniel Samuel ("Nate") Fisher Jr., the son of a funeral director who, upon the death of his father, reluctantly becomes a partner in the family funeral business with his brother David, played by Michael C. Hall. The Fisher clan also includes mother Ruth (Frances Conroy) and sister Claire (Lauren Ambrose). Other regulars include mortician and family friend Federico Diaz (Freddy Rodriguez), Nate's on again off again girlfriend Brenda Chenowith (Rachel Griffiths), and David's boyfriend Keith Charles (Mathew St. Patrick).On one level, the show is a conventional family drama, dealing with such issues as relationships, infidelity, and religion. At the same time, it is a show distinguished by its unblinking focus on the topic of death, which it explores on multiple levels (personal, religious, and philosophical). Each episode begins with a death — anything from drowning or heart attack to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome — and that death usually sets the tone for each episode, allowing the characters to reflect on their current fortunes and misfortunes in a way that is illuminated by the death and its aftermath. The show also has a strong dosage of black humor running throughout.A recurring plot device consists of a character having an imaginary conversation with the person who died at the beginning of the episode. Sometimes, the conversation is with other recurring dead characters, notably Nathaniel Fisher Sr. The show's creator Alan Ball states they represent the living character's internal dialogue by exposing it as an external conversation, yet on some occasions (see the appearance of Nathaniel Fisher Sr. at the end of the last episode of the first season) no living character sees or interacts with the dead character. Also, in many encounters with dead characters the dead character relates information the living one could not know, almost certainly speculation on the part of the living concerning issues which were never solved before the passing. Casual conversations with the dead also reflect the genre of magical realism. A similar device is occasionally used where a real conversation between two living characters slips into the imaginary and becomes unrealistic. The shift cannot be clearly distinguished from the normal flow of the scene until an abrupt cut brings the audience back to a mundane conversation, which reveals through contrast the imaginary nature of the preceding moment.
