All's not well for the depressive Fisher family on HBO's fourth season premiere of "Six Feet Under" (9 p.m. Sunday). And that's just how they seem to like it.

		'Six Feet Under' When: 9 p.m. Sunday on HBO

Alas, it's not how I like it. "Six Feet Under" is one of those shows I watch because I'm supposed to. It's a series many critics have championed, and I feel compelled to keep up with it, but I don't get a lot out of the endeavor.

Sunday's premiere illustrates exactly why: Not only is it a depressing hour, picking up right where last year's season finale ended, but more gratingly, it's too predictable. If I said how, I'd be accused of divulging too much, but let's just say whenever you expect the show to zig, it does. For an allegedly edgy show, the zagging is kept to a bare minimum.

"I'm sick of Nate's bull----," Claire (Lauren Ambrose) says after her eldest brother fails to show at their mother's wedding. "I'm so sick of everybody being so ... awful all the time."

Claire, I feel your pain. Of course, she regrets her words when Nate (Peter Krause) returns and informs his family that his wife, Lisa, is dead. Was it a drowning accident? Was it suicide? Those questions will haunt Nate, literally, throughout the season. "Six Feet Under" is probably most powerful in its early episodes this season -- four were sent for review -- when it tackles the theme of grief and Nate's response to Lisa's death.

Subsequent episodes pick up the story three months later, and the mood, mercifully, is a little lighter.

Keith (Mathew St. Patrick), boyfriend of David Fisher (Michael C. Hall), gets a job as a bodyguard to a Hilary Duff-like star, played by Michelle Trachtenberg. One can't help but wonder where she gleaned ideas for how to play a spoiled, demanding diva; perhaps on the set of her last TV series, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"?

Other stories on the prime-time soap this season include Brenda (Rachel Griffiths) and her romance with neighbor Joe (Justin Theroux); Ruth (Frances Conroy) and married life with her new husband, George (James Cromwell); and Claire's curiosity about a lesbian classmate (Mena Suvari).

"Six Feet Under" deserves commendation for the creative deaths that open each episode. If you don't pay extremely close attention -- and frankly, even if you do -- it's tough to connect this week's death with the rest of the story, but once you get it, it's a good one. Next week's episode begins with an uproariously funny sequence, but it's also deeply cynical in its depiction of conservative Christians. To anyone who's watched "Six Feet Under," that should come as no surprise.