Six Feet Under: It's life in a living death

By MICHELE HEWITSON

We all know how this works. We all want to know whether Nate dies tonight when Six Feet Under returns (TV One, 9.40). But if I tell you, you will have to kill me.

Actually, I really don't know whether Nate lives or dies.

Nate doesn't know whether he lives or dies. His father, Nathaniel snr, the really dead guy, makes one of his appearances.

"Just tell me," pleads Nate. "Am I dead? Yes or no."

"Yes. And no. Some places you're dead. Some places you're alive. Some places you never even existed."

But is he dead? "Possibly. Theoretically. Or who knows?"

Tricky, huh? That's one way of looking at it. The other way of looking at it is to conclude that Six Feet Under, which has never resorted to such trickiness to engage us, has changed tack.

As it opens, as we wait to find out whether Nate got on that big, empty bus and chose either life or death after brain surgery, we are offered alternate realities.

Alternate realities? Wasn't that what it was all about in the first place: those alternate realities that everyone creates inside their own heads?

It seems excessively manipulative to offer variations on the truth of that big question: life or death? Choose one.

So, if Nate is alive, is he now a fat idiot wearing a baseball cap, who spends his days watching bizarre soap operas (like this one?) where the characters say things like, "We always end up in a universe in which we exist".

Or is Nate brain-damaged and consigned to a living hell which involves David teaching him how to say "cat" and "goat"?

Or is he living happily (happily? Come on) with that ghastly new-age earth mother, Lisa, and baby Maya?

Is Nate now happily going to lunch parties where the conversation is about astrology and Lisa's problems as she tries to master breast-feeding?

"You know," she says brightly, in the middle of what may or may not be Nate's nightmare, "breasts are really modified sweat glands." Oh God, please let him be dead.

No Brenda tonight, except for a brief appearance in yet another alternate reality. Is Nate now married to Brenda? Do they have a child? Now that could be interesting: Brenda as a mother. Somebody let the authorities know.

Wasn't this show once about life in the midst of death? Now it seems to be about life as a sort of living death.

Keith and David are in counselling. They are trying to deal with David's "doormat" issues and Keith's anger issues.

"Maybe," poses David in the kitchen, "you want total control over what actually happens inside the wok."

Keith: "I love you. Pass the carrots."

So we've got therapy-speak, and simpering Lisa-speak: "Things happen the way they're meant to."

We loved this show for its black humour; now it's merely bleak. We loved it for its clever portrayal of the ordinary lurking just beneath the surface of the dysfunctional; now it's trying too hard to be clever.

What was it all about again? Alan Ball, the show's creator who wrote tonight's episode, said it was about "people attempting to live an authentic life" in a world that is increasingly unauthentic.

I suppose you could argue that whatever alternate reality we find ourselves in by the end of tonight's episode, it will be an authentic reality.

But it is hard to get past the feeling of being toyed with so early on.

It feels unauthentic: like undergoing brain surgery and emerging from the anaesthetic to find all those you loved have become people you don't much like.