Kroehner and Six Feet Under

House in Six Feet Under // photograph by Joseph Voves

My wife and I are binging Six Feet Under while sheltering in place. Hey, we're only twenty years behind on this one.

If you're even more behind than we are on this, this contains spoilers, but at least so far, none hugely connected with the storyline.

From the beginning of the series, Kroehner (not to be confused with the Nordic currency) is a massive funeral home corporation that is buying out all the small, family run homes. In a classical progressive portrayal, it's an evil conglomerate where the acquisitions representative is predatory and the major shareholder someone who would probably list throwing puppies off tall bridges as their ideal weekend activity. Oh, and throw in a little bit of insurance fraud as well.

I don't have a problem with any of those things. The portrayal I mean. Throwing puppies off bridges and insurance fraud is bad. People with poor moral compasses and bad businesses exist, as cliche as it has become in Hollywood. But the business practices depicted in the show more or less follow a flawed portrayal of predatory businesses. Their business plan appears to be to buy out all the competitors, engage in price wars, and vertically integrate.

This doesn't work in real life. Not for long, anyway, without government intervention to establish rules to prevent smaller companies from being able to compete. Everything Kroehner was doing was prohibitively expensive. They were already engaging in razor thin to negative margins to try to put other homes out of business, which must result in poor cash flow. At the same time they're buying out all these funeral homes from people who don't want to sell, meaning they have to overbid to purchase the businesses. They're also trying to vertically integrate, buying out all these suppliers or strong-arming them to not sell to the smaller homes. This is a huge strain on their balance sheet. Add it all up and the result is a very unhealthy company that is likely in massive debt.

So I had to just hold my nose in this department and watch the show and suspend my belief in that aspect. It's not a hugely important part of the show and well, being a libertarian, we have to do this if we want to enjoy shows at all.

//spoiler alert//

Much to my surprise, toward the end of season 2, it's revealed that Kroehner filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Did the writers open up a business textbook and realize this? Did they consult the one libertarian working in showbiz and conclude that Kroehner would go under?

Eh, probably not. The show mostly glosses over it (so far, at least) without much explanation. They did mention federal investigations, where, since they were engaging in insurance fraud, they're probably also committing other illegal acts. That's probably where the writers were coming from.

But I'll take small "victories" where ever I can get them. Libertarians aren't going to get many on screen.