IF HBO ISN'T TV, THEN WHY IS IT ON CHANNEL 3?

How far have I come since I tried to cancel my cable in January? Far enough to have purchased a 32" television and gotten myself hooked on the premium channels which magically started coming through after I sent the cancel order. Penn & Teller's "Bullshit" on Showtime is terrific, but by "premium channels," of course I primarily mean HBO. And if it just as magically got cut off now, I'd probably just start paying for it. With a fall season including "Curb Your Enthusiasm," "Real Time With Bill Maher," the new Ricky Gervais/Stephen Merchant show "Extras," and not soon enough another round of "The Sopranos," I'm stuck.

One show I never planned to care a whit about was "Six Feet Under." Until this summer, I had seen just three episodes, courtesy Netflix. The original concept was interesting enough: a family drama set around a funeral home. But from the get-go it seemed too much a soap opera, and Echopraxia told me the show got only more unrealistic while the funeral home aspect became more tangential as the series went on, so I didn't bother queueing up any more. The best thing about the show, I contended (and still do) was the eerie opening theme. If nothing else, go find that on Soulseek.

But I'll watch lousy HBO before I watch lousy network programming, not to mention before I (God forbid) actually turn the damned thing off. Plus, I'm sort of compelled to see how any given popular television show show closes out, and my mysterious HBO subscription happened to coincide with the end of this particular program.

And I will say this for "SFU": They killed off the main character with three episodes left to go, and the last five minutes of the final episode was truly remarkable.

It's that concluding segment which inspires this post. Against a piano-driven folk-rock melody, a series of "glow-vision" flash-forwards shows how the show's surviving principal characters met their ends — twenty, forty, eighty years into the future. For a show in which at least one person dies every week (usually just someone who ends up in the Fisher family morgue) it was the best possible conclusion. The preceding hour or so is all right, but I'll save my recommendation for the final segment only. Ann Althouse has some fair criticisms of the montage, and so does one of her commenters, but I think it worked anyway. Schmaltzy and flawed, sure, but nevertheless powerful, and until I find out it's been done before, original. Plus there's that song, "Breathe Me," by someone named Sia, which makes me want to hear more from that artist. "Everybody dies" — as Television WIthout Pity titled its typically-snarky-and-more-comprehensive-than-necessary summary — is hard to argue with.

UPDATE — I wandered past the "Sopranos" weblog at NJ.com, and according to Michael Imperioli, shooting for Season 6 wraps in February 2006. That means Season 6 won't be out for a few months thereafter. So, uh, maybe we still have another year to wait before that show's final season. Or, as David Chase keeps hinting, its penultimate.

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posted by WWB at 11:04 PM |