What is it with Six Feet Under (Thursday, 9.30pm, TV1) and dead people? Being harassed from the grave isn't unheard of in television drama, but for a show about undertakers, you almost expect it to be commonplace. The Fisher family pillar head, Nathaniel Fisher (Richard Jenkins), carked it in the pilot episode, and since then has made regular visits from the afterlife to see his wife, daughter and sons. He usually offers advice; not so Lisa (Lili Taylor), Nate's (Peter Krause) dead hippy wife who materialized in last week's season opener (the fifth and final) to lay the smackdown on Brenda (Rachel Griffiths). She was pregnant with Nate's child, only miscarried the night before their wedding. Most sane folk would have postponed, but fuck that. They tie the knot the next day as scheduled, despite placenta still running between her legs.

Dead Lisa thinks Brenda isn't deserving of a baby, and that this miscarriage is karmic payback for all the "anonymous cock" shoved up her during her sexed-up sociopath phase. She's trying so hard to be a mother and a wife right now, but has that tarnished once-was-a-slut history to her womb, which Lisa gladly rubs in by surveying the reception for worthy moms-to-be, pointing them out as shining examples of maternal purity. Of course, everyone's got their fair share of problems on Six Feet Under – that's a given – but isn't it about time the living got on living without dragging so much deceased baggage around? Come season five, we'd like to believe that Nate has grieved and dealt with the death of Lisa – he hijacked her body from the crematorium and buried it under some nondescript tree in the desert, for crying out loud. But the woman still follows him around – and now Brenda – like a bad, decomposed smell. Die already, godammit.

Creator Alan Ball seems to have a specific irony in mind: that despite the Fisher's being in the business of laying the dead to rest, they've never actually come to terms with the concept themselves. Perhaps they're just desensitized, or expend so much energy on clientele that when it comes to their own, they've got nothing left in the tank. Is that why they see dead people? Maybe. Either way, it's become somewhat trite, although does make for great cross-over potential with that Jennifer Love-Hewitt Ghost Whisperer chick. So while she's purging the Fishers of their sixth sense, chances are they'll be able to finally concentrate on doing dysfunctional in the here and now without dead relatives butting in. If first episode intuition serves me right, expect vicodin, incest, psychotic outbursts, weird sex, gay couple melodrama, more miscarriages and another death in family by the series' end.

Speaking of cross-overs, they seem to do plenty of overlapping on CSI (Friday, 9.30pm, TV3). In truth, the only episode I've ever seen in full is the Tarantino-directed one (if only for the buried alive set-piece). But with the show having franchised itself from Las Vegas to Miami to New York, there's a natural sandwich of intersecting ideas, and one can easily assume lead characters have made the occasional guest star jump between adjacent CSI locales. I actually loath the crime genre (apart The Wire, among a few others), and struggle to see the appeal in dissecting grisly murder with a pair of tweezers, surgical gloves and a black-light. What I've learnt though is that Crime Scene Investigators function in reverse, beginning with a corpse, frisking it for clues, before reconstructing events backwards from the time of death. Inverting trauma can work profoundly – as an anti-violence statement in Irréversible, notably – but from what I've seen in CSI, it comes off as mere scientific gamesmanship, while victims seem boxed into deductive thought processes and piecemeal flashbacks.

When it comes to death, I prefer the morbid fascination of Six Feet Under – the bizarre curiosity of seeing a woman on a gurney with a large gaping hole through her eye socket, for instance. We're often privy to such brazen observations from the Fishers when they're embalming a body, and as insensitive as holy-shitting over a dead person's fatal wound is, they reckon it's how you deal with the confrontation of horror. Six Feet Under confronts at least one arbitrary death a week, and without wanting to sound overly Manson-esque, it's the part I look forward to most. Every episode begins with an obituary: sometimes genuinely tragic (the woman who's eating lunch at home alone, and chokes on a bone), other times seriously hard-luck (the guy who gets hit on the head by a high-rise construction worker's lunch box), and occasionally so obscene it's hilarious (the guy who's beating off with a cord around his throat to intensify the orgasm, only ends up strangling himself). Most recently, said woman was seen getting her life back on track, and after a therapy session, is urged to vocalise her inner-most feelings to family and friends. When it comes to her husband, she's unhappy, while he's peeved, citing all the IKEA/Pottery Barn furniture he's adorned her domesticated life with. They tussle over an antique chair, and in the blink of an eye (pun intended), he's pushed her across the room, and she's impaled her face on some wrought iron ornament.

In tonight's episode, some in dude in an SUV runs over himself. Television? You bet.—TW

» Alan Ball | USA | 2001-2005
» Anthony E. Zuiker | USA | 2000+