It might have been before I’d started watching Six Feet Under, at least in earnest, that someone I was talking with said she didn’t like the show because she didn’t like any of the characters. It wasn’t that the acting was bad, or that the writing was bad, or that the characters were flat exactly, it was just that none of them were people she would ever care about.

After watching the show into its second season, I can see what she means. The characters are aloof, selfish, tetchy, resentful, even mean – not horrible people, just generally unlikable ones.

As I’ve been watching Six Feet Under, I’ve been comparing it to Deadwood (the show that Six Feet Under has come to replace as the one show I watch, at least until the next season of Deadwood comes out on DVD). Take a guy like Deadwood’s Al Swearengen. He’s hostile, he’s seedy, he’s utterly self-interested. He prostitutes women, runs opium, corrupts children, insults “the gimp,” “the Jews,” “the chinks,” -- and actually feeds people, his own men from time to time, to pigs. Plus, he’s dirty and (as his name would seem to suggest) he swears a lot. Clearly, here is one of television’s most unlikable men.

And yet I keep comparing Deadwood favorably to Six Feet Under (and I keep watching Six Feet Under, which is something I haven't yet figured out).

One thing the comparison reveals is that Six Feet Under operates exclusively on the level of the personal. David has his problems, Nate, Ruth, and Claire have theirs, and the show builds itself around the emotions and psychology of these individuals. It seems consistent with a show about people who’ve grown up in a funeral home, people for the most part alienated from themselves and others, that they don’t seem to connect much. To this point in the show, nothing that one character does seems to really impact another, at least not much beyond some eye rolling at the dinner table.

Deadwood, too, is a show about individual characters – their idiosyncrasies, their motives and emotions, but one that functions at the level of the social. Al Swearengen may be hateful, but when he moves, ripples are felt throughout the community. Set in a gold rush era mining camp, a camp in the process of becoming a town, the show lends itself readily to issues of community. According to the writer/director David Milch, he had planned to set the show in ancient Rome, among, if I remember correctly, the police. When HBO told him they already had a Rome show in the works but they’d give him a contract if he could change the setting, he adapted the Roman cop show to the old west. That such a change was possible, and in the end so successful, suggests a portability of structure. Rather than being about how Romans are, the show is at its root level about social interactions, exercises of power, and the often tendentious development of community.

In this way, Deadwood ends up being a lot more complicated than Six Feet Under whose characters impact, if anyone, only a few and briefly. Deadwood's equations are a lot more complex. And that may be why the very bad people of Deadwood are, in the end, more likeable than the less bad people of Six Feet Under -- they're at least tied to other people.