The Mortician, directed by Joshua Rofé (Jonah Hill is one of the show’s executive producers), is a 3-part docuseries about how David Sconce did ethically questionable things with people’s bodies as the owner of Pasadena’s Lamb Funeral Home, all in the name of maximizing profits. The centerpiece of the series is an interview with Sconce himself, right after he was released from prison in 2023 after serving for ten years.
Opening Shot: A fire inside a cremation oven. Then, we cut to a woman’s hands, holding a small tin.
The Gist: Through interviews with David Sconce, people who worked for him at Lamb, the families of some of the people he prepared for cremation at the funeral home, and even rival funeral directors, a picture is painted of how Sconce mutilated bodies in different ways in order to make money.
Sconce was from a long line of Lamb family undertakers, who operated the funeral home since it opened in 1929 and became one of the leading places to send Pasadena-area residents off to eternity. Sconce took over the business in the 1980s, but before he fully took over, he had come up with a unique side hustle, which is to provide pickup service for places that used to bring bodies over to the Lamb family crematorium, and undercut the prices of other funeral homes that did the service.
Within a couple of years of starting this service, Sconce was cremating over 4,000 bodies per year. Given that his family’s crematorium had only two furnaces, and it takes about two hours to fully incinerate a body, how was that possible? By cramming in as many bodies as possible, often needing to break bones to do it. It also means that the cremains were mixed together; customers who wanted to receive the remains of their loved ones likely received mixed remains.
There were other things that Sconce did, whether he did them himself or instructed his staff to do so, that helped profits: He hacked off fingers that had rings on them, and chipped fillings off teeth in order to recover the gold. He also had people on his staff intimidate and beat up rival funeral directors, especially if they started to make noise about his methods.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Mortician has the noirish feel of another recent HBO docuseries, Ren Faire.
Our Take: While we enjoyed the dark, foreboding style of The Mortician, the real reason why the docuseries is so fascinating is that Joshua Rofé managed to secure an interview with David Sconce himself. All you really need to know about this story can be gleaned via an interview with a man who seems to have nothing but explanations and excuses, with absolutely no remorse.
When he’s asked about his methods for maximizing profits via multiple cremations in one furnace, his reasoning is close to sociopathic: Essentially, the bodies are just that, they’re not people anymore. As far as mixing cremains, he somewhat defensively tells Rofé that there’s always going to be cremains of others mixed in with those of who’s being cremated, just by the nature of how the oven is constructed.
What these answers speak to is a person who truly has no regard for how the families of the people he cremates view the sanctity of their loved ones’ remains. To him, it’s pure business. If he has to disfigure bodies to get them to fit in the oven, so be it. If he shovels some random ashes from a trash bucket into a tin and tells someone that it’s their loved one’s cremains, that’s no problem. To Sconce, the cremains don’t represent humans, they represent flesh and bone in their most fundamental forms.
When he talks about all of this, we can’t help but get a creepy and ghoulish vibe from him, and Rofé doesn’t shy away from just how creepy it all is. The next two parts will go into more about how Sconce ended up going to prison on two different occasions, with the most recent stint coming after he violated probation. We suspect that there will be more creepiness, which is exactly the mood that Rofé wants to set with this series.
Sex and Skin: None… hopefully.
Parting Shot: Tim Waters, a rival funeral director who was about to blow the whistle on Sconce, mysteriously dies of natural causes at a young age. When he heard that Waters had died, Andre Augustine, one of the people who drove the trucks that collected the bodies for Sconce to cremate them, says, “I’m my mind, fuckin’ Sconce did that.”
Sleeper Star: Augustine is quite the witness to all the shenanigans that Sconce was doing at the crematorium. Another interesting witness is a former worker who decided to stay unidentified; he talks about a clothes hanger full of the rings Sconce stole from bodies. Sconce’s ex-wife, Barbara Hunt, talks about Sconce’s entire family asking her on her wedding day if she really wants to go through with the marriage.
Most Pilot-y Line: After Sconce gets out from his latest 10-year prison stint, he’s shown getting a burger at In-N-Out.
Our Call: STREAM IT. The Mortician effectively shows just how ghoulish the things David Sconce did to people’s loved ones really was, and does so mostly through Sconce’s own words.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.