Alan Ball Didn’t Hesitate for the Darkest ‘Six Feet Under’ Death That House of the Dragon Did Years Later: ‘You can’t do that. You can’t go there’ (2025)

Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball took HBO's note to make the show more "f*cked up" so seriously that he did what HOTD did in season 2.

With its very first season, Alan Ball’s Six Feet Under took the world by storm with its deep exploration of death. The HBO show did not hold back on really looking into how people dealt with grief of the largest kind, the grief of death. From hate crimes to accidents, Six Feet Under covered almost everything under the sun.

However, one episode early in the show was reportedly too much for a writer though it was still explored. Ball mentioned that the season one episode ‘The Trip’ dealt with the death of a three-week-old infant and a writer at the time thought it was going too far. Twenty-three years later, an infant death in House of the Dragon also elicited similar reactions.

Alan Ball On The Six Feet Under Episode Which Dealt With Crib Death

HBO changed the nature of Television as a place for the family to forget about their problems. The premium cable network did not always deal in sitcoms and family dramas like other networks but ventured into dramatic storytelling with shows like The Wire and The Sopranos. In 2001, it debuted the drama series Six Feet Under.

Created by Alan Ball, who had won the Oscar for writing American Beauty and would go on to create True Blood, HBO’s Six Feet Under was a deep exploration of death and grieving from the perspective of a family-run funeral home. The series won an Emmy for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series for its pilot episode and would go on to win several more.

While death hardly seemed to be the best topic for TV, the show received critical acclaim and was even loved by general audiences. However, one episode in the first season reportedly spooked a writer as it may have gone too far. The episode, ‘The Trip’ deals with the death of a three-week-old infant, who dies of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

Ball mentioned that though he was encouraged by HBO, a writer on the team had second thoughts. He said to The Independent,

I remember early in the first season there was a crib death. And one of the writers was saying, ‘You can’t do that. You can’t go there. It’s too upsetting,’ and I’m like, well, we have to go there. We have to. Because these people who do this for a living, they have to go there. And we have to go there with them.

The episode reportedly got actors Freddy Rodriguez and Lauren Ambrose their Emmy nominations, though they lost to actors from The West Wing. This year, another HBO show explored infant death yet again (although not from SIDS) in the House of the Dragon season 2 premiere ‘Blood and Cheese’. Author George R.R. Martin has expressed his love for Six Feet Under before.

HBO Reportedly Told Alan Ball To Make Six Feet Under ‘More F*cked Up’

The late ‘90s and 2000s were an era of great TV. Shows like Breaking Bad, The Wire, The West Wing, The Sopranos, and more elevated the TV format into an art form and proved that the format could be used as a storytelling tool and not just a means to push out content. Boy, have we come a full circle since then.

Though it is not clear who first came up with the idea of Six Feet Under, showrunner Alan Ball reportedly credited HBO entertainment president Carolyn Strauss for telling him the idea, which he developed. While it was already an unorthodox idea, Ball told MovieWeb that the network had a bizarre note to give when he handed in his first draft. He said,

Certainly one of the most memorable moments was when I went to HBO and they had read my first draft and Carolyn Strauss said, ‘You know, this is really, really good. I love these characters, I love these situations, but it feels a little safe. Could you just make it just a little more fucked up,’ which is not a note that you get in Hollywood very often. And I thought, ‘Wow!’ And that gave me free range to go a little deeper, go a little darker, go a little more complicated, and that was certainly one of the most memorable moments.

The note definitely worked as the show introduced a lot of concepts that would have hardly made the cut on TV on any other network or show.

Six Feet Under is available to stream on Max.