ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the meaning of home and at-homeness in writer and director Alan Ball’s popular Home Box Office cable-television series, Six Feet Under, which completed its fifth and final season in 2005. The chapter contends that there is much about the home life presented in the series that represents a traditionalist understanding of home. The chapter argues, however, that in other ways—including the fact that the presence of death is always calling the world of the living into question—the series’ portrayal of contemporary inhabitation reflects an innovative postmodernist understanding. The chapter ends by considering how Six Feet Under uses the uncanny as one means to propel characters’ personal transformations and thereby point toward a more progressive mode of home and at-homeness.
