Six Feet Under characters buried beneath their soapiness

As certain as we were that "barren Karen" on Corrie - as Tracy Barlow taunted - was going to lose the baby, we knew that Brenda was going to miscarry on Six Feet Under (last night, TV One).

The first episode of the last series was a reminder that Six Feet Under is as much a soap as that other one.

And what a long time, between seasons, we have stuck with it, or not.

It is not much of a stretch to compare the two.

The test is whether the characters endure, as annoying, loved, cliched or and just familiar - so much like somebody we all know and like to gossip about.

Soaps don't have ghosts, surely. The bloke who plays Karen's Steve said, in a doco made to mark her leaving the Street, that he was expecting one to turn up any day soon. And here we have Brenda on her wedding day, having miscarried the day before - how soap is that? - having an argument with husband Nate's dead wife, Lisa, who is more awful than Tracy Barlow.

"I'm maternal," smirked Lisa, "not like you. Your insides must have got damaged from ..." Yes, okay, there are some things you won't hear on a soap.

But how familiar this sounds. Brenda: "I'm going to get my baby, you bitch. You're bitter because you had to get pregnant to get Nate to marry you."

Lisa: "I'm bitter? Who's drunk and yelling at a dead woman?"

This was truly fabulous stuff. All that was needed to complete the scene was for Brenda to push Lisa, dead already or not, over a cliff to finish her off once and for all.

That's a good test: when you hate a character so much you want to kill her when she's already dead.

There were some lines you could forgive in a soap proper that just make you want to die inside when you are watching something that has pretensions to darker things.

Nate to Brenda on their wedding day: "I'm glad today sucks because I wouldn't want the happiest day of our lives to be over already, would you?"

Well, yes, actually. That might have been a better set-up for the inevitable gloom that is this family life. That might have surprised us. Brenda's "it [expletive] better be" didn't save it.

Still, it delivers some delightful non sequiturs of the kind that all families delight in. Rico, talking about a banker he had dated through an agency, said to Ruth that she was "too shiny".

Ruth said this could have "just been an unfortunate lotion". Like embalming fluid, possibly?

What an angst-ridden, dysfunctional lot they are. As the end approaches and we wonder who's going to die, do we retain any fondness for any of them?

I quite like mad George. He has depression and psychosis. He doesn't know what he's doing living in a funeral home with Ruth, and who her gloomy, self-obsessed brood are. No more than any of us know why we're still here watching.

Waiting for the death of some characters, I expect. Tick, tock. Let's wait and see how they end it before we bury it.