Here’s what this article in Deadline says of the recent HBO series “The Mortician”:  “The three-part documentary series, which chronicles the inhumane practices at a funeral home in Southern California, debuted on June 1. Since then, the show has tallied more than 2.6M cross-platform viewers in the U.S., per the network.  It’s now the most-watched HBO documentary series in over five years.”

Here’s another quote from the Deadline article, “Featuring an exclusive interview with (David) Sconce, newly released from prison, the series examines the lucrative and ubiquitous multibillion-dollar mortuary industry and illuminates what can happen behind closed doors, away from public scrutiny. With emotional interviews with families of the victims of the Lamb Funeral Home and revelations from former employees, The Mortician unravels a dark, troubling story that involved mass cremations and stealing from the dead in a multitude of macabre ways. “

Funeral Director Daily take:  I watched all three parts of the series and would argue that this type of publicity for the Death Care profession is not good.  It struck me in two separate ways — first of all I thought of some of my childhood lessons from my parents, teachers, and other mentors about “doing things the right way”.  It appeared to me that once members of the greater Lamb family from the funeral home took shortcuts it was much easier to take bigger shortcuts and deprive client families the sacred trust that they put in the funeral home.

That lesson is “take the time to always do things right”. . . . .because once you don’t it is simply easier and easier to simply “do things easy” not necessarily correct.

The second lesson that I took from watching the series was if you know something is wrong “Stop it” because continuing to do the improper procedures will just spin out of control and be harder to stop in the future.

The Lamb/Sconce family had more than one person found guilty in their operation of the funeral home/crematory so a jury found them culpable.  It was truly a bad episode of Death Care for the greater Los Angeles area and, as seen in the documentary, there are still people suffering from the dishonesty of that mortuary 45 years later.

Couldn’t figure it out —  I reached out to a colleague of whom I knew was in business in Los Angeles in the Lamb Funeral Home time period.  He told me that his staff was aware of the great volume of cremations that the Lamb Funeral Home was doing at a low, low price of $55 per cremation and they could not figure out how they could be profitable.  The arrests, convictions, and documentary now show how.

What’s the “Relevance” of 2.6 million viewers? —  Well, the United States has a population of about 340 million people, so while 2.6 million viewers sounds big, it is less than 1% of the total population of the United States.  The Deadline article says the viewership “beat out some high profile documentaries like Pee-wee as Himself, Chimp Crazy, Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God.”  

The good news is that those titles are not “Top of Mind” for me. . . . .and “The Mortician” is  not being compared to the viewership of Titanic, The Wizard of Oz, Lord of the Rings – The Return of the King, The Lion King, or Jurassic Park — whom IMBD states are the “Most Viewed” movies in history.

Here’s a couple more comparisons:

• “The Burial” — Last year’s Amazon Prime movie about funeral provider The Loewen Group and their downfall, was rated by “watch time minutes” and not viewership.  However, if you use the minutes viewed it would equal to a total cross platform viewership of about 5 million at this point in time — almost double the viewership of “The Mortician”.

• The “Wheel of Fortune“, America’s top game show rated by viewership has between 7.9 and 8.3 million viewers per episode.

• The 2025 Super Bowl featuring the Chiefs vs. the Eagles had a cross-platform viewship of about 127.7 million views — about 37% of the American population.

So, in the long run, I would argue that “The Mortician” was not a great promotion for Death Care.  However, there were lessons to be learned and the good news included that not a great deal of the public saw the series and the unscrupulous behavior of an uncommonly sinister family group of funeral home owners.

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