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Nancy Oliver emerged as a screenwriter in the early 2000s and built a professional reputation as a scribe with a quirky, offbeat sense of humor (and more than an occasional dark edge), a deft hand for idiosyncratic characterization, and an instantly identifiable voice. One of Oliver's earliest and most memorable accomplishments arrived when she teamed with Alan Ball on that director-cum-producer's pay-cable series Six Feet Under (2001-2005), authoring manifold scripts for the distinctly macabre HBO seriocomedy in its third, fourth, and fifth seasons; she also occasionally assumed production duties on the program. Oliver transitioned to features by scripting the Craig Gillespie-directed black comedy Lars and the Real Girl; it told of a socially backward, orphaned young man (Ryan Gosling) who shocks just about everyone by ordering an inflatable female doll over the Internet and toting it around as his latest "girlfriend." The film earned Oliver nominations from the Writers Guild of America as well as the Academy for Best Original Screenplay.