I am in the love Brenda camp too. She really matures throughout the series and yes, she was a total POS in the first few seasons and some of her story lines were a bit :rolleyes:, she does become a worthwhile human being eventually. And she has plenty of pain inflicted on her, which doesn’t exactly exonerate her, but does make her more sympathetic.
I named one of my cats after Claire (well, partly that Claire, and partly The Breakfast Club’s Claire because she’s a round little tabby and it’s a fat girl’s name).
Maybe it was because she’s a fellow redhead and she is almost exactly like one of my sisters, but I could appreciate her bad choices as I’ve made more than a few of those myself. Maybe without so many drugs though.
I came to love David and one of the reasons I love the series is that almost every character had times I either loved or hated them. Except for Lisa. I never, ever, ever liked Lisa even though I do like Lili Taylor.
Is it actually possible to like Lisa? She was pretty much designed by the script makers to be completely unlikeable. I think I was actually pleased when she was killed.
For me, it was more that she so did NOT fit in with the family and Nat didn’t love her enough (or at all) to help her find room there. She was besotted with him and found out that you need to be careful about what you wish for because you just might get it. Her whole family seemed to look down on the Fishers as well.
I had times when I liked Brenda then I hated her, but in the end, I went from liking Nate pretty much throughout to realizing that he was just a womanizer. I was sorry about the end for him, but was disgusted by his refusal to TRY with Brenda. He ran away and then–well, we all know what happened.
I liked Ruth a whole lot more by the end of the series.
I just thought it was great how in the final episode, when Ruth starts packing to move out of the funeral home, she looks at her clothes and says “nobody’s worn clothes like these in 30 years” and Kathy Bates gleefully tells her it’s time to go shopping.
I felt really bad for Brenda in the end. By the last seasons (once she finally got the French Horn guy out of her life), she really was trying to just be a normal person and have an normal life, and then she got more and more added to her pile of burden. Her and Nate were equally offensive to each other, so it worked in its own weird way, but at the end Nate still wasn’t ready to settle down and be boring.
I think what REALLY does it for me in the final episode is how this is probably the one and only time in the series where it shows all of the Fisher family together and HAPPY.
I watched this series through Netflix last year and I loved it. I think it has the best writing/characters as any show I have ever seen. I loved how complex each character was - you went from loving them to hating them to being frustrated to rooting for them, the way you do with people you actually know/love. They were real people, not just stereotypes and they did great things and made horrible mistakes. No one was a hero or a monster, they all just had flaws.
We could hardly get a new DVD without watching every episode on it all at once, but yes sometimes it was gut-wrenching!
I have heard similar good things about The Wire, so we are going to start that series soon. I have to say it has been SO critically acclaimed though, I don’t know how anything can live up to what I have heard (so many critics just say it is hands-down the best tv series ever made.)
Yes, and I had to laugh at what seemed like Brenda choosing that moment to die rather than listen to more of Billy’s blather. But I don’t think we saw anything more of Billy. I loves me some Jeremy Sisto.
Wait, can someone recap, in spoiler boxes if necessary, the Lisa plot for me? A post above seems inconsistent with what I remember. And FWIW, I really like Lili Taylor too, and was excited to see her name in the credits, but man did Lisa become a rotten little annoyance.
From what I remember about the Lisa plot (which isn’t much): she was having an affair with someone – her brother-in-law, I think – and he killed her. I don’t remember why he thought he needed to kill her though, maybe to keep her from telling his wife?
Okay, that’s what I remembered, but I thought it was more of an irrational idea that Nate had. Did I miss something in an episode which corroborated this?
Note:I also thought the same notion Nate had made him question Maya’s parentage, and that he wondered if she wasn’t actually his.
Lisa’s niece found a picture of Lisa taken on the day she was murdered. She gave a book (Stiff I think) to David with the picture in it, Nate got it and realized it’s significance. He went to talk to the niece about where she had gotten in and (I’m a little fuzzy on the details) but he ends up confronting her brother-in-law with the fact he knew that he had seen Lisa on the day she was murdered. The end result was that the brother-in-law blew his brains out
[spoiler]who really fathered Maya, but we never find out.
Also, Nate buried Lisa in the wilderness without embalming or a coffin (according to her wishes). But Lisa’s family wanted her cremated remains in the family mausoleum, so Nate ended up giving them the cremated remains of an unknown person instead.[/spoiler]
Ooohhh. Okay, I definitely missed that. There was a chunk of one episode at the end of the Lisa story arc that I had suspected I’d missed, but I very definitely missed that stuff.
I, too, had heard lots of good stuff about this show, and after watching most of it on Netflix (I’m half way through either season four or five) I really agree that it is amazing television. It can be extremely draining to watch it all smushed together, though - in some ways I feel like the writers should have included a bit more sunshine in their lives - almost everyone seems to make terrible choice after terrible choice, and so rarely do they talk to one another about what they are actually thinking or feeling! It can be painful to root for characters so much and see them not only go through so much pain, but actively inflict in on one another! It looks like David and Keith are finally pulling out of that, which i’m grateful for because when they’re good together, they are one of my favorite TV couples ever. I like Michael C. Hall so much more as a gay funeral director than a straight serial killer!