Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The knells sounded last year when
Six Feet Under, HBO’s turbulent saga of Pasadena undertakers, was laid to rest after five seasons. And, fittingly for a show that featured dozens of memorable demises, it bowed out in breathtaking style. (Those who didn’t catch season five on E4 should skip the rest of this paragraph starting NOW.) There was Nate’s death, the grief of the Fishers, and the virtuoso closing montage, which flashed forward to each of the other cast member’s deaths. Real lump-in-the-throat stuff. The response from the American public, says Alan Ball — the show’s warm and candid creator, co-writer and sometime director — was “tremendous”.
But it’s all over now, and Ball, as they say, has moved on. “I’m done grieving,” he says. “I felt as though the show had lived the life it needed to live.” For him, and the rest of the crew, “the grieving process happened during the show. We were grieving the end of the show as we were filming it, as the characters were grieving, so it was a weird meta event.”
Besides, Ball has had bigger things to think about. Having worked on a show about death for five years without attending a single funeral, he had to cope with his mother’s, in October. The experience of her funeral was “interesting”, says the practising Buddhist with Zen-like detachment, and was certainly informed by Six Feet Under.
“I can’t say working on the show made me comfortable entirely with death, but it did make the grieving process much less frightening,” Ball explains. “In the past, when people I’ve been close to have died, it’s felt as if some alien presence invaded my life. This time, I wasn’t afraid of it.”
The real-life funeral directors, it seems, were worthy of David and Nate at their diplomatic best. “They did a wonderful job,” Ball says, though several couldn’t resist puncturing the decorum by asking for his autograph. “One of the younger directors came up to me, and said: ‘You’re the reason I’m in this business.’ I had to check to make sure that was a good thing! And he was like: ‘Oh yeah, I find it very rewarding.’”
Ball, 48, has been relishing a new phase in his career. His current roster includes All That I Will Never Be, an off-Broadway play about cultural imperialism, and Towelhead, a Gulf War film that he is writing and directing, his first cinematic work since winning a screenplay Oscar for American Beauty in 1999.
And death, of a sort, lingers on in his new television project, True Blood, a mooted series based on Charlaine Harris’s novels “about vampires in Louisiana”. “I picked up the first book on impulse,” he recalls. “I read it . . . and then read the next five.” He has just finished writing the pilot, which he will direct.
The combination of bloodsuckers and the Deep South leads to inevitable comparisons with the work of Anne Rice, but, Ball insists: “It’s not Gothic in the way that Rice is. It’s contemporary rural America, white trashy, very funny and really scary.” Nor do the spectres of Buffy or Angel loom large: he professes never to have seen either. “I know that they’re successful shows and have rapturous followings. But my agent said: ‘
This is not like Buffy’, which is good.”
True Blood takes its name from the brand of synthetic blood that the Japanese have patented in Harris’s novels. Vampires can actually drink it, Ball explains, thereby bypassing their need for human blood. Having shed one of their more antisocial habits, the vampires “decide to make their presence known, hire PR firms, and sort of . . . come out of the coffin. A lot of churches are horribly against them, but they are very wealthy, and contribute a lot of money to Republican politicians so that they can legitimise their holdings.” He had fun with subtexts: “Vampires are a great metaphor for minority groups that struggle for rights and recognition, but also for Republicans, in that they’re vicious and bloodthirsty and will destroy anything that gets in their way.”
Ball’s mordant humour and emotional intelligence colliding with one of popular culture’s most enduring genres is a thrilling prospect. Given his track record and current standing, it’s hard to see True Blood not being commissioned, especially as he has retained his links with HBO, the trailblazing channel behind Six Feet Under, The Sopranos and Sex and the City.
“It’s the only time where I feel like somebody hired me to do what I do and then got out of my way and let me do it,” he says. “Most American television is interested in doing something that resembles something that has been successful before.”
Ball speaks from experience. In 1999, he created a sitcom, Oh Grow Up, for ABC that “in my mind was really subversive, similar to The Young Ones. And by the time it was aired, it just looked like a corporate, horrible American sitcom.” But HBO, he insists, is “really interested in doing new things”.
Some might suggest that True Blood’s subject matter is not entirely new for a man who has been exploring the darker side of existence for the best part of a decade. But Ball is ready for them. “I’m sure people will go: ‘The undead . . . Six Feet Under was about dead people . . . American Beauty, the guy died at the end,’” he admits. “But I find it incredibly different.
It’s more popcorn TV than Six Feet Under. It’s very raucous, more entertaining, much, much funnier. I’m done peering into the abyss for a while.”
Six Feet Under season five is out to buy on DVD on April 10
