It was the closing image of about the second or third episode in season 1, the house across the road on fire, that made me think I would stick with Six Feet Under, both because it showed that the show was willing to go to some slightly stranger (and perhaps more melodramatic) places and because of the striking nature of the image itself, the eerie suburban vision straight out of Crewdson (an artist, incidentally, explicitly referenced later in the series). And what's kept me going since has been the human drama at the heart of the show, woven in with its themes (which are the biggest ones - mortality and how to live a life), very much including the characters' arcs, some of which I at least think I can extrapolate to possible endpoints over the remaining three seasons, others much less clear to me (about midway through the second season, I began to feel Ruth - the wonderful Frances Conway - particularly intensely).
