Six Feet Under HBO

Fifteen years ago on June 3, HBO premiered “Six Feet Under.’’

And it was good, very good. The series, which HBO2 is airing in its entirety — the marathon ends Sunday at 12:15 p.m. — but which is generally available on HBO streaming and On Demand, had five mostly excellent years on the air. The first few episodes were a little underdeveloped, I thought, as they introduced the Fisher family and their funeral home business. But the drama, from Alan Ball, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “American Beauty,’’ quickly found its character rhythms and thematic anchors, and it finished in 2005 with one of the best TV series finales ever made.

I can’t think of a TV show that so honestly and consistently portrayed death and grief. Sure, TV is crammed with cadavers, the organs and blood artfully spilling out of them like overripe fruit from a horn. But crime-solvers on those shows usually come along and find the explanations for those deaths. In a way, they feed our culture’s denial of the randomness and inevitability of death by giving it a reason.

On “Six Feet Under,’’ the deaths were usually completely random, almost comically so, as they occurred in the opening minutes of each episode. And the accompanying grief was filled with the kind of brutal honesty and self-analysis that defined many of the characters on the show as well as the tone of the dialogue.

The characters were remarkably complex and original, each of them tangled up in idiosyncratic webs of fear, self-contradiction, artistic frustration, sexual compulsion, and/or drug use. Without being excessively quirky, they were far from clichéd, from Rachel Griffiths’s Brenda, the brilliant masseuse, to Michael C. Hall’s David, a gay Christian fighting against his own doormat issues. Lauren Ambrose’s Claire brought depth and mystery to teen angst. If any of them had been seen on TV before, they hadn’t been constructed with such rich psychological layering. Each scene was presented as a step in the characters’ primal search — for identity, for love, for escape.

RIP, “Six Feet Under.’’

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @MatthewGilbert.