How can a show about death and suffering leave viewers feeling inspired and fulfilled? This is… How can a show about death and suffering leave viewers feeling inspired and fulfilled? This is the wonderful enigma of HBO’s Emmy-winning drama “Six Feet Under.” The show takes the everyday lives of a Los Angeles funeral parlor family and delves deep into the complexities and tumult that latch on to every character. The fourth season officially began last Sunday at 9 p.m. (the usual time slot), picking up right where it left off at the end of the previous three seasons of addictive television.

The Fisher family lost their father and director of the business in a car accident several years ago. Ruth, his wife, has taken on the role of house-moderator and is now the default authority in the business decisions. Nate, her elder son, came from Seattle to help the family through the rough time and eventually wound up staying in Los Angeles once again. David, the other son, holds the formality of the business and clings to it as a career. Daughter Claire hopes to escape the pseudo-psychosis she believes her family has acquired via living around dead bodies her entire life. That is only the surface of this layered scaffold of intertwined frictions, failures and fates.

Nate unknowingly fell in love with Brenda, who originally was a quick-sex fling but soon turned into a regular girlfriend. Fueled by memories of his father and nagging thoughts of mortality, he desires to establish some sort of stable life. However, Brenda, while scheming, cheated on Nate and spoiled any hope for a “normal life.”

Meanwhile, squeaky-clean David is the modest businessman who accepted his homosexuality only three years ago. He originally questioned whether God was punishing him, but now wonders whether his prickly boyfriend Keith, whose slight frustrations send David into a spiral of defensiveness and self-loathing, is punishing him.

Emotionally defeated and spiritually void, Claire finished last season by having an abortion. The child would have been fathered by her former boyfriend Russell, whose sexual explorations and curious non-commitment left Claire no alternative but to leave him. This earthy and outside-of-the-box character desperately seeks her niche in the world, but is aghast at all of the evil she sees within it.

The show’s characters all seem to revolve around the central figure of Ruth. The widowed mother did not grieve more than a few days for her lost husband; she has had several romances within the three years after his death. Conflicted between holding her place as the caring grandmother or reaching out and experiencing life after what she perceived to be an imprisonment of a marriage, she has decided to enjoy new love and marry her little-known boyfriend Arthur. The contradictions between all of the characters’ lives and how they envision life for their mother show the constant struggle that nourishes the show.

The new season will highlight the continuing saga of David and Keith’s fluctuating relationship, Ruth and Arthur’s spontaneous marriage and Nate and Brenda’s ability or inability to stay away from one another. Though witness to all of this, Claire hopes to finally find someone to call a boyfriend. While the season will certainly be full of pain, it will continue to make viewers analyze their own lives and encourage hope.