Six Feet Under & The Forsyte Saga

Let's call last week's column a test to see who was paying attention. You may have been alarmed, after psyching yourself up for Anne Frank, to find James Bond's The World is not Enough on Channel 7. I was alarmed as well. Anne Frank will be showing tomorrow night (Channel 7, 8.30pm).

Attentive television viewers may also have been alarmed to find that the new season of Six Feet Under (Channel 9, Monday, 10.45pm) has gone all Buffy on us and shifted into a parallel universe. One in which Nate doesn't die on the operating table but lives and is married to Lisa, a woman with whom he shares a child, but no passion. Brenda is only glimpsed, in a moment of possibility.

For those who had trouble following the exciting leaps of logic in last week's episode, they are supposed to relate to Schroedinger's cat theorem, which goes like this: You take a cat and place it in a lead box. You toss in a vial of lethal cyanide that is controlled by a valve that has a 50/50 chance of decaying. If the valve breaks down the vial opens and the cat dies. If it doesn't, the cat lives. Schroedinger argued that until the lid is opened the cat is simultaneously dead and alive and it is only the act of opening the box, and our perception of the cat's status, that forces it to choose one particular outcome. Thus the beauty of the moment when Nate opens the coffin lid and spins himself, and Six Feet Under, back into an off kilter world.

Who knows if Ruth would have become a drug addict in the universe of the first two seasons? But certainly this Monday's episode suggests that Ruth, like her children, is about to tumble head first into the complexities of modern life.

Tomorrow night heralds the return of The Forsyte Saga, (ABC, 8.30pm). It's a four-part adaptation of the third book in John Galsworthy's series, and takes up where the last season finished. It is 20 years since Queen Victoria has died. Soames Forsyte struggles with the social revolution that follows WW1, and with the fact his daughter, Fleur, is falling in love. She has inherited her father's arrogance and obsessive intensity and there is nothing she wants more than what she can't have. And what she can't have, of course, is Irene Forsyte's son, John. The acting is very strong however as the characters lose their layers of Victorian clothing, the melodrama becomes more clearly revealed. Costume drama often provides a veneer of respectability under which soap opera lurks. But I love I good soap, and by the third and fourth episode I was sitting on the couch chewing my nails, unable to decide whether love should really be allowed to have its way, no matter how perverse that way may be.

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