What a series. What a last season. What a finale!
I started watching it without knowing too much about it, I just knew from hearing about it a few years ago that it was one of those "Amazing HBO series" and that it was about a family owning a funeral home.
The actual "plot" is indeed about a family-owned funeral home in which the father of the family dies (this is at the very beginning of the first chapter, so I'm not spoiling anything), and the series follows the life of the rest of the family: The 3 sons (2 male of 30ish and the girl who is in the last year of school), the widow wife, and some supporting characters
If you ask me, the acting and the writing are everything in this show. Characters are complex, they evolve they don't always move forward - sometimes lessons need to be learned multiple times, as real people do. And each actor does an amazing job in portraying their character.
Each one has 2/3 major arcs throughout the show, so it is very interesting to see them navigate them.
Different topics are touched across the episodes, many of them very controversial, but the show portrays them in a very serious way. There's some dark humour though; after all it's about a funeral home where death comes with customers in every episode.
Definitely a must watch. And even though it is more than 20 years old, it has aged very well.