SIX FEET UNDER (2005)

If anyone knows that all good things must come to an end, it is the fans of Six Feet Under, a show about dying (but really about living.) The HBO funeral-home drama about the Fisher family aired its final episode, Everyone’s Waiting, on Aug. 12, 2005, after five seasons. Unlike the previous 62 episodes, the show did not begin with a death, but with a birth.

The elegant, therapeutic final scene flashes forward to happy moments and milestone events to come in the lives of the main characters – the wedding of Michael C. Hall’s David to Mathew St. Patrick’s Keith, for example – before the manner of all their deaths are tastefully revealed. The dialoguefree montage is set to the soft sounds of Sia’s Breathe Me.

The show which often confronted death with black comedy and regularly showed naked corpses on mortuary tables went out peacefully. Even Keith taking bullets during an armoured car robbery felt poignant. Heart strings are pulled shamelessly.

The family’s youngest child (the rebellious, artistic redhead Claire, memorably played by Lauren Ambrose) is leaving Los Angeles. Before she goes, she wants to snap a photo of the family. “You can’t take a picture of this,” her dead brother Nate tells her. “It’s already gone.”