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The show received mixed reviews before the network cancelled it.
    The experience proved discouraging for Ball. Like other HBO
    series creators Darren Star ( Sex and the City ) and David Chase ( The Sopranos ), he found working in network television a dispiriting and frustrating experience: ‘When my last show, Oh Grow Up , was cancelled by ABC [after only 11 episodes], I thought if I have to do another four-camera laugh track sitcom I’ll shoot myself’ (Brown 2001). A detour into film would change his profile when, in 2000, he won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay with American Beauty ; the film won five Oscars, including Best Picture, and grossed nearly $350 million around the globe. The success of American Beauty meant Ball was much in demand and could leave behind network television. ‘I was offered everything, but I didn’t want to become a hired gun,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to be hired to write other people’s ideas. I had done one year of Grace Under Fire and three years of Cybill . That was enough. It’s no mistake that American Beauty was about a man who was beaten down and lost interest in his life rediscovering his passion for living’ (Weinraub 2001: 21).
    Ball admits that had American Beauty not been such a commercial and critical success ‘HBO would not have come along and offered him almost total freedom on Six Feet Under ’ (25). But had he not been so taken with The Sopranos , he would not have got
    ‘so excited about the possibilities of television’ (Hendrickson 2002: 114). Soon after the film’s release, Ball met with Carolyn Strauss, senior vice-president for original programming at HBO, who told him that her favourite films were Harold and Maude (1971) and The Loved One (1965) – ‘black comedies that take decidedly irreverent attitudes toward death’ (Weinraub 2001: 21). Inspired by her interest in producing a show about running a funeral home, he wrote the pilot. HBO bought the concept and gave him a 13-episode commitment – and Six Feet Under was born (or so the story goes).
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    READING SIX FEET UNDER
    What proves intriguing about this story is that Ball turned his back on film and theatre as well as network television. Like other TV auteurs Star and Chase before him, and despite being an Oscar winner, Ball confirms that HBO is the place to work. ‘I get notes from HBO saying, “You don’t have to spell this out, it’s clear what’s happening,”’ Ball has said. ‘They actually say, “Give it more edge.”
    That doesn’t happen on network television. On network television, everything is explained. Nothing is ambiguous. Any kind of edge is removed’ (Weinraub 2001: 21). But this is more than just differentiating itself from network television, despite what Ball is saying.
    HBO prides itself on producing television with a new and groundbreaking sensibility; it may be drawing on talent and conventions from elsewhere (independent film, Off Broadway theatre and even network television), but it remains first and always television.
    Liminality, Six Feet Under and TV To Die For Creating an awareness of what HBO is doing is vital to an understanding of how the institutional context produces Six Feet Under .
    Operating as it does in a wider industrial context of changing televisual narratives, transforming generic conventions and how television is watched and consumed means its tag-line – ‘It’s Not TV. It’s HBO’ – is more than a distinction for its original programming from regular TV fare; it is describing a transitional moment in television culture. Just as Six Feet Under explores and is about liminal states, might it not be argued that HBO gives additional meaning to this idea?
    Victor Turner, who writes about socio-cultural moments of transformation, describes liminality as being about a culture contemplating its rules and conventions, often using performative or dramatic forms with which to do so (1977). Six Feet Under, on the surface at least,