I absolutely love Peter Krause. Six Feet Under and Parenthood are master classes of perfect melodramatic television and he’s a god in both of them.
Six Feet Under is one of the most embarrassing things I liked when I was younger. I tried watching it again a year or two ago and couldn't make it four episodes.
I've definitely enjoyed it overall. He's a big reason why for sure. Don't think I'd ever seen anything he was in before that
Like American Beauty, it treats characters outside of the main group with a lot of disdain and shallowness. It makes them so unsympathetic to the point of being cartoonish. The conglomerate trying to buy the funeral home had two characters that should have been twirling their mustache. It uses the conceit of a funeral home to just create a dour mood the entire time. It also does a lot of your work for you, as you can use it to substitute more complicated human emotions. It is misery porn, because it is understood how much of a hit a death is to people, rather than something more nuanced and up for debate. Alan Ball's worst work will always be Towelhead, but in all the stuff of his I have seen he doesn't know how to add shades of grey, but would rather line up the fish in the barrel for the gallery to shoot. Brenda's parents stick out as being particularly cringeworthy. Ball intended them to make you cringe, but they are that way for reasons he didn't intend. So many people are reduced to a type; the mother's sister is a hippie, as is the woman who has Nate's kid. Claire's college friends don't feel like real people at all, but rather a projection of what you might only see of a young adult when they are posturing.
I can’t disagree with most of this but for what I want out of the show, it delivers 100% so I still love it.
Six Feet Under is a good example of a show I didn’t enjoy but still watched all the way through because I felt like I “had” to due to its reputation. I thought it was pretty bad.
I remember enjoying six feet under but strongly disliking Nate by the end but I also can't remember why
Is it unpopular to say you enjoyed Bicentennial Man? Because every time it's on TV I watch it again and enjoy it.
I don’t think that ever registered in pop culture enough for any opinion about it to be popular or unpopular.
lol true. I think Robin Williams just put out so many dramas from like 1996-2004 that the market for him was just oversaturated. Just looking at his filmography, he averaged 3-4 movies a year during that time. The only two years he didn't have a movie come out in that span were 2000 and 2003.
I think it was less oversaturation of Robin and more that it had a pretty bizarre tone so it never caught on in any age group very deeply. He was definitely in a period of making out there choices with what he did, and some were much more successful than others.
I never found him very funny. He had his moments but most the time I found him annoying and over-exaggerated in a bad way. There’s only maybe 3-4 things he’s done I like a lot.
Good point on the age group thing...it's not really kid-ish enough to be a kids movie and most of the humor is above a kids heads, and it's too super formulaic in its...sentimentality?...to attract anything more than passing interest from adults. But yeah it was a crazy time for Robin Williams movies as far as dramas go. Good Will Hunting, Jack, Patch Adams, Jakob the Liar, Bicentennial Man, What Dreams May Come....prob a few others in there I'm forgetting.