I’m no seer or anything, but I think I was the least surprised person in America at the success of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the little indie film that could. I married into a Greek family, and if there’s one thing I have learned about Greeks, it’s this: If you build it, and it has bouzouki music, they will come.

Nia Vardalos, the effervescent Canadian-born improv comedian who wrote My Big Fat Greek Wedding (first as a one-woman autobiographical stage show), knew this too. She persuaded the movie’s distributor to set up advance screenings for Greek church groups in large and medium-sized cities around the country, and word of mouth spread through this fiercely proud community. (My husband and I joke that the buzz went something like this: " Two thumbs up! The first must-see movie since Zorba! " )

Then a funny thing happened. Non-Greeks (or, as the father in the movie calls us, " everybody else who wishes they was Greek " ) went to see My Big Fat Greek Wedding and recognized their own families in Vardalos’s depiction of an emotional ethnic clan where the parents cling to the old ways and the younger generation yearns to be more " American. " The most ringing endorsement I have heard about the film came not from one of my Greek relatives but from an Indian colleague of my husband’s. When a Silicon Valley computer programmer from the subcontinent connects deeply to a movie about a Greek family from Chicago, you know you’ve got a phenomenon in the making. It’s no wonder that Greek Wedding went on to become the highest-grossing independent film (and romantic comedy) ever, having earned some $250 million so far just in the States.

But was it a good movie? Well, not really. Sure, the Greekisms were wincingly funny, from the flag of Greece painted on the Portokalos family’s garage door to the way the mother never takes no for an answer to her offer of food. ( " Are you hungry? " " I just ate. " " I’ll make you something. " ) And Vardalos’s character, Toula, sums up the second-generation Greek experience in one acutely observed speech that’s delivered as an apology to her white-bread fiancé, Ian (John Corbett): " I have 27 first cousins and my whole family is big and loud and everybody is in each other’s lives and businesses all the time and you never have a minute alone just to think because we’re always together, just eating, eating, eating. And all the people we know are Greek, because Greeks marry Greeks to breed more Greeks, to be loud, breeding, Greek eaters! "

But My Big Fat Greek Wedding is, as its core, a TV sit-com blown up to big-screen size. And it’s an underwritten sit-com at that. For most of the movie, Toula, the dutiful Greek daughter, is torn between her intrusive family’s displeasure at her engagement to an outsider and her desire to follow her heart. After the trials she and Ian endure leading up to the wedding (their families mingle about as well as souvlaki on Wonder Bread), you wonder how they can ever be together. There should be final test of commitment, on either Toula’s part or Ian’s, but there’s only a big fat storytelling hole in Vardalos’s screenplay. Instead, Toula’s wedding day comes and goes in a flash and it’s all very anticlimactic — especially if you’ve ever been to an actual Greek Orthodox wedding, which, I assure you, does not go by in a flash. Then again, if My Big Fat Greek Wedding offered a more authentic wedding, the movie would have been longer than Titanic.

In its transition from the screen to its tube version, My Big Fat Greek Life (8 p.m. Sundays, CBS), a not-so-funny thing happened: the sit-com movie became a real sit-com, and suddenly the movie looks like high art. It doesn’t seem possible that My Big Fat Greek Wedding could be simplified for TV, but it was. Toula is now called " Nia, " and Ian is now called " Thomas. " (Steven Eckholdt replaces Corbett in the sit-com.) I’m sure there were focus groups involved in the name change, but I can’t explain the reasoning behind it. The observations about Greek-American life that seemed sharp and revelatory in the movie are blunted through repetition (enough with the family popping in on Nia and Thomas uninvited). Weak characters like Toula’s dumb brother Nick (Louis Mandylor) and her slutty cousin Nikki (Gia Carides) do not grow any more tolerable when you see them every week. Worst of all, Nia has become more of a spineless daddy’s girl than Toula is in the film.

At the beginning of Greek Wedding, Toula is a 30-year-old frumpy " spinster " stuck working in her father’s restaurant. Her life changes with one glimpse of her Prince Charming, a tweedy professor, and she comes out of her shell. She takes computer classes at college, gets a new hairstyle and contact lenses, battles oppressively manipulative dad Gus (Michael Constantine) for her freedom and wins. With her sturdy, unabashedly Grecian looks and Everygirl charm, Vardalos made a terrific first screen impression, flaunting her ethnicity and winning you over with her chutzpah, like a Greek Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl.

But in the sit-com, Nia is unable to stand up to Gus (Constantine returns, minus the Windex he sprayed on everything as a cure-all in the movie). Toula’s triumph has been negated; Vardalos may be slimmer and have better clothes and hair than she did in the movie, but her TV character is a doormat, and the effect is depressing rather than comical. In fact, My Big Fat Greek Life plays like an Aegean-flavored Everybody Loves Raymond, with Vardalos as Ray and Constantine as Ray’s mother, but without Raymond’s flashes of family misery and nastiness. My Big Fat Greek Wedding was a pleasant enough confection, a honey-sweet bite of baklava. But as the sit-com demonstrates, a whole tray of it is just plain unappetizing.

ETHNIC TV FAMILIES don’t have a monopoly on dysfunction — not as long as the Fishers of HBO’s Six Feet Under are around. The most repressed family on television began their third season March 2 (the show airs at 9 p.m. Sundays) with a typically show-offy trick from creator/writer Alan Ball. The central character, Nate Fisher (Peter Krause), died on the operating table during surgery for a brain aneurysm.

Fooled ya! Nate wasn’t really dead, he was just having anæsthesia-induced hallucinations where he imagined he was wandering around the Fisher family’s funeral parlor watching himself take every conceivable road less traveled. Nate’s fine now (I think). In fact, he’s married to Lisa (Lily Taylor), the mother of his infant daughter Maya, and he seems to have forgotten almost entirely about Brenda (the sensational Rachel Griffiths), his promiscuous and complicated former fiancée. Fatherhood — and a near-death experience — has turned the previously irresponsible Nate into a wide-eyed font of " be here now " wisdom who marvels aloud at the miracle of his daughter’s bowel movements.

As for Nate’s gay older brother, David (Michael C. Hall), he and partner Keith (Mathew St. Patrick), the hunky disgraced cop, are in couples counseling: Keith is abusive and David gives Nia Portokalos some serious competition in the doormat department. Sullen teenage sister Claire (Lauren Ambrose) is in art school, but she’s still easily distracted by any toxic hottie who throws her a smile. The Fishers’ flinty, paranoid employee, Federico Diaz (Freddie Rodriguez), is now a partner in the business, but he still can’t get any respect (or so he believes). And mother Ruth (Frances Conroy), who drove her brooding Russian boyfriend away last season with her passive-aggressiveness, has channeled her loneliness into being an annoyingly available grandmother.

Six Feet Under is not quite as clever as it thinks it is. What’s meant as irony — the episode-opening death of the week, for instance — comes off as a cheap trick. And the show’s message, that you’d better live it up because death is barreling down on you like a runaway bus, is as obvious as Ball’s facile suburbia trashing in American Beauty.

Still, there’s something fascinating, even thrilling, about the defiant unlovability of these characters. Which is why you end up loving them despite themselves. The Fishers live with death all around them, professionally and personally (the patriarch of the family, Nathaniel, got hit by a bus in the series’s first episode). They know the drill when it comes to loss and finality. It’s life that has them stymied.

In the previous two seasons, David feared risk and exposure, Nate feared commitment, and Brenda feared true intimacy. Dowdy Ruth and sarcastic Claire were mirror images of depressed, self-destructiveness. Looming over all of them was the ghost of Nathaniel Fisher (played with a whiskey-sour tang by Richard Jenkins). Dad had secrets (a mistress, a whole ’nother life), and he died behind the wheel, bending down to light a forbidden cigarette. Now he haunts Nate, clad in a black funeral suit and white shirt that make him look like a jazzy hipster, puffing on cigs and breezily riffing on the unknowable. Even in death, Nathaniel Fisher is more alive than any of them.