The dead and unlively

By FRANCES GRANT

While the dead were steadily trundled in and out of the family funeral home in the fourth season of Six Feet Under (season finale tonight, TV One, 9.45pm), the living seem to have wasted a lot of time waiting for something to happen.

It is only now, at season's close, that the drama seems to have got a move on and the storylines are finally delivering some of their promise.

At last, we're getting down to the nitty-gritty of why serial husband George has managed to get through six wives and counting. His growing obsession with planetary catastrophe has taken a much more interesting turn now he's discovered and redecorated his dream home - the backyard bomb shelter from the 50s.

Wife Ruth has had nothing much to do this season except pout and droop over her disastrous new marriage, but she was finally back in fine, self-improving form last week, demanding George go with her to a tantric love workshop.

With her Californian zest for self-transformation returned, perhaps Ruth might finally click that long, flowing Pre-Raphaelite hair could be a mistake on a fiftysomething woman with a penchant for pinnies.

David, too, looks close to a resolution of one of the more tedious and predictable plotlines. Yes, the psycho carjacking was traumatic but there are only so many aftershocks one can take in a telly drama, even one set, as paranoid George keeps reminding everyone, in earthquake-prone LA.

Nate, after his wettest season in the show so far, has finally come full circle and got back with Brenda. Let's hope we've heard the last of her infidelity addiction.

Nate even has a new enemy to stir him out of his torpor - his dead wife Lisa's close kin. They might live in picket-fence Idaho but they're like the Addams Family, without the laughs.

Staying with Six Feet Under has required commitment in a season in which the funereal drama appeared to be digging itself into a big hole.

Sex has substituted for action, with everyone from the olds rocking the house in their brief period of post-nuptial bliss to daughter Claire's equally short foray into lesbianism - an experiment which occasioned some of the most intriguingly frank lines about female pleasure, or lack thereof, ever heard on the telly.

There has always been the sense that the show's best characters have been left cooling their heels on the margins. This season has compounded the feeling that, although brilliant in their invention, the script-writers have never quite known how to usefully employ the likes of Brenda's mother, a post-modern nightmare of Californian therapy culture, or shoplifting hooty mamma Bettina.

Ruth's sister, the wonderful 60s-leftover Sarah, Botoxed, no doubt, and ready for the Age of Aquarius, has barely had a look-in, and Brenda's loony-tunes brother Billy has only made it back in time to spice up tonight's finale.

Six Feet Under has always been character-driven and its strength is that it has never worried about their likeability. Gays everywhere must be thankful for its telly achievement in portraying gay relationships as tormented, needy and deluded as all the rest.

While tonight's cliffhanger could be a humdinger, it has taken an age for enough tension to build for the increasingly insular world of the self-absorbed Fishers to feel like it's going to blow wide open.

Perhaps it's best not to hope for an eruption on the scale of a Mt St Helens. The plug has been pulled on the show in the US, with creator Alan Ball deciding it has run its course.

With one more season to go, they could be saving the big one till last.