Peter Krause

Lore & Background

David Fisher is the eldest of Nathaniel's three children and the one who, from the very first episode, is already shouldering responsibilities that belong to no single person. He works the floor of Fisher & Sons, handling prep, logistics, and the unglamorous mechanics of death while his younger siblings orbit the business from a distance. His marriage to Ruth, a fiercely loving but deeply flawed woman in the grip of alcoholism, forms the emotional spine of the series. David's love for her is patient, almost self-erasing, and it is this very patience that the show slowly interrogates—asking whether devotion can become a kind of slow surrender.

His relationship with his father is the show's central tension. Nathaniel is brilliant, impulsive, and often cruel in his honesty; David is the son who absorbs every critique, every dismissal, every moment of being treated as the reliable one rather than the favored one. Their scenes crackle with a specific, lived-in resentment that never quite resolves, because David Chase understood that the most painful family wounds are the ones that never get the chance to be named properly. David's work in the funeral home gives him a daily, physical intimacy with death that no other character matches, and it shapes his worldview in ways the others simply cannot fathom.

By the final season, David has become the family's quiet gravity. His death—sudden, accidental, and devastatingly ordinary in its cause—lands not as a dramatic twist but as the inevitable conclusion of a man who spent five seasons giving everything to everyone else. The show does not offer him a heroic exit. It offers him a Tuesday, a crosswalk, and a silence that follows, which is, in the language of Six Feet Under, the most honest eulogy possible.

Reader's Guide

David Chase designed David Fisher as the audience's surrogate for the question what does it cost to be the one who stays? Every creative decision around the character reinforced that burden. Krause was cast not for a magnetic screen presence but for a specific quality of stillness—a way of listening that made other actors' chaos feel like weather moving through a fixed point. Chase reportedly wanted David to be the character the audience would defend, protect, and ultimately grieve for, which is why his flaws were never cartoonish. His impatience with his father, his quiet resentment toward Ruth's relapses, his small humiliations at the prep bench—these were written as wounds, not jokes.

The decision to kill David off in the finale, rather than giving him a narrative resolution, was a deliberate rejection of television's comfort reflex. Chase and the writing team understood that the show's entire thesis was that life does not arrange itself into a final monologue. Krause's performance in the last episodes carries a particular lightness, as if the character has already set down the weight, and the audience feels the drop before the screen does. The result is that David's death doesn't feel like a plot event. It feels like a door closing in a house you've been living in for five years, and the silence after is the point.

Did You Know?

• Peter Krause was a working actor with a modest résumé of television guest roles before Six Feet Under made him a household name; the role was, by most accounts, the first time audiences saw him as a leading man.
• The dynamic between David and Ruth was structured as the show's emotional barometer—when their scenes felt stable, the Fisher family was stable; when they fractured, the entire ensemble's equilibrium shifted.
• Krause's David is the only Fisher sibling who works the physical prep side of the funeral business, giving him a daily, hands-on relationship with the dead that the other characters experience only from a distance.