Producers Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner read one of Ball's plays and offered him a chance to serve as a story editor as well as to write scripts for one of their sitcoms, "Grace Under Fire" (ABC) during the 1994-95 season. The following season, he jumped to another Carsey-Werner sitcom, CBS' "Cybill" where he spent three seasons (1995-98) and rose through the ranks from co-producer to co-executive producer. All the while, Ball was concentrating on an idea for a play loosely inspired by the real-life case of Amy Fisher, a Long Island teenager who, after becoming involved with an older married man, shot his wife. Intrigued by the media circus that followed (there were three made-for-television films made on the subject) and the fact that the truth was undoubtedly being obscured, he began to write a play examining what might drive people to such extreme behavior. Invoking memories of his own Southern upbringing, Ball spent several years refining his version morphing it into a dark comedy-drama that served as his first produced screenplay "American Beauty" (1999). Purporting to examine what might go on behind closed doors in suburbia, the finished film, directed by Sam Mendes and starring Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening, stuck a chord with moviegoers. Part "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", part "Lolita", "American Beauty" examined the mid-life crisis of a man bored by his job and alienated from his family. Well-acted and strongly directed, it won substantial praise from critics and announced the arrival of a very distinctive voice in motion pictures.

While Ball was enjoying his first flush of big screen success, he was faring less well in his return to the small screen. Having signed a three-year deal TV production deal with The Greenblatt Janollari Studio, he mined incidents from his own life to create the ABC sitcom "Oh Grow Up" (1999), centering on three men, two heterosexuals and a newly "out" gay man, sharing a home in Brooklyn. Critical reception was lukewarm as was the response from viewers.

Ball could eventually console himself with his big screen success (including a Best Original Screenplay Academy Award) and the resultant screenwriting offers, but television provided an itch than Ball was compelled to scratch. Trading on the edgy cachet he created with "American Beauty," Ball embraced the creative freedom provided by non-network HBO to create another signature series for the pay cable channel: "Six Feet Under" (2001-2005), like "Beauty," peered into the darkest recesses of typical American life to discover the private personal horrors--and joys--that exist on a daily basis. Because the series' protagonists--the compellingly dysfunctional Fisher family--also worked in the funeral business, the daring, frequently morbidly funny show provided an unflinchingly intimate portrait of the workings of grief, mortality, sexuality (both gay and straight) and the complexities of family dynamics unlike any other series on the air. As creator, executive producer and even frequent director, Ball was clearly the central figure behind the series: he would ultimately collect a 2003 Emmy for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series, a shared 2002 DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Dramatic Series and other awards, while the series and its cast and crew would win and/or be nominated for a plethora of prestigious honors; most tellingly, when other projects beckoned and Ball chose to give up a direct day-to-day involvement in 2005, the decision was made to end the series with his departure while it was still riding high creatively, rather than see it limp forward guided by lesser hands like so many other television ventures.