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Between March and April 2013, the Discovery Life network (then known as Discovery Fit & Health) aired a six-part reality series called Funeral Boss; the show is now available to stream on Amazon Prime Video. For the uninitiated, The Boss is William C. Harris Jr., a St. Louis funeral director in his late 40s (he became the youngest funeral director in Missouri when he was just 18). Bill is a black man with a greying goatee and itsy-bitsy wire-rimmed glasses, fond of Louis Vuitton luggage and matching his patterned ascots and handkerchiefs. While he’s a long way from his own golden years, thrice-married Bill is in the death business, and thus already mulling over his legacy. Specifically, which of his heirs will run the company, a prominent television plot line these days (Empire, HBO’s forthcoming Succession). At William C. Harris Funeral Directors & Cremation Service, Bill has four candidates—William III, Tiara, Windall and Westley—his vice presidents and grown children with his first wife.
Funeral homes have proved ripe for pop culture family sagas before. The affairs of The Fisher & Sons Funeral Home were mined for five Emmy-winning seasons of drama on HBO’s Six Feet Under. In 2006, A&E concluded its fourth and final season of Family Plots—a reality series about a dad and his three daughters, all employed at the Poway Bernardo Mortuary in Poway, California. Meanwhile, Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir set at the Bechdel Funeral Home, Fun Home, was adapted into a Tony-winning Broadway musical.
These narratives told the stories of white families, but there is also a modest subset of reality TV devoted to black-owned funeral homes where dying is viewed not as bleak but as a heavenly homecoming. TLC was the home for Best Funeral Ever, which ran for eight episodes over two seasons (The Hollywood Reporter called it “surprisingly not a monstrosity”), while Good Grief was cancelled before it aired on Lifetime in 2014. On Best Funeral Ever, John Beckwith Jr., owner of Dallas’s Golden Gate Funeral Home, voiced an objective that the Harris family would go on to echo: “We’re going to make these families extremely happy at the worst moments of their lives.”
Despite sharing a unique workplace setting with these other series, the show Funeral Boss reminds me of the most is Pawn Stars on History. Now in its 12th season, Pawn Stars chronicles the transactions and tangents of those rooted to the World Famous Gold & Silver Pawn Shop in Las Vegas. Like Bill Harris, owner Rick Harrison is smart, very good at his job, and training his occasionally-knuckleheaded offspring to run the family business. The Harris clan can find their patriarch overbearing (“You could put him in the Guinness Book of World Records for holding grudges,” son William says), a feeling Harrison likely shares (his own surly “Old Man” monitors his every move from the shop’s backroom). Both shows are about people parting with memories, and assigning monetary value to what once seemed priceless. Also, the opening credits for Pawn Stars and Funeral Boss include the donning and doffing of fedoras.
To a lesser extent than Best Funeral Ever, the services on Funeral Boss include a few noteworthy embellishments, like the presence of praise dancers, flag twirlers and “steppers,” pallbearers who choreograph casket-carrying routines. Yet within the first 12 seconds of Funeral Boss, viewers are confronted with one sight that never cropped up on Best Funeral Ever: cadavers. Real people, just like you, who were once alive. Even though a warning proceeds each episode, it is still a bit of a shock (you acclimate, for better or worse, but such blatant displays of mortality prevent you from being lulled into any sort of reality TV escapism. Although the logistics—the usually-boring reality TV details of who is going where, when—are more absorbing when the dizzying stake is peace of mind of emotional family members). My mind jumped to the gauche production task of asking grieving families to sign release forms so their relatives’s corpses can be frocked and Botoxed—even in a respectful way—on camera (the show didn’t have a following; no bereaved loved one could claim, “My dad was such a fan. He would have wanted this”).
The first time I attended a funeral with my mother, she talked about one hypocrisy: everyone consoles the distraught family by telling them that even in death, the person “looks so good.” In reality, she believes, when a person’s dead, they’ve never looked worse. After watching Funeral Boss and seeing what care Bill and his staff take into preparing a person for their final viewing, I’m suspending this line of thinking. Still, it remains unsettling to me that death is the most natural of occurrences, but funeral pomp involves so many elements uncharacteristic of everyday life, from wearing a certain color to procuring live doves.
A significant part of the show involves watching raw grief, and it’s heightened on Funeral Boss: when you are looking at, say, the face of a young murder victim for the last time, his mother is doing the very same. I commend those who are able to be devastated onscreen. I could never do it, no matter how universal the pain is.
The Harris family is dealt a personal loss in the final episode, and Funeral Boss contains one meteoric, non-grief-related meltdown: Tiara, who pays the bills, notices that her brother has been given a raise (there can even be a wage gap among siblings!). But there is also some endearing silliness, mostly courtesy of William, the oldest brother, who lets nothing but rubberneck-worthy honesty escape his buck teeth. Talking about his future-fiancée and the mother of his child, Wendy, who stood by him while he went to prison for heroin possession, he admits, “When I first saw her, I was like, She ain’t even all that.” Here’s how sums up his proposal: “I figured I’d ask my boo thing to marry me today.”
In a pair of middle episodes, I was struck by something Bill tells two different heartsick female relatives: how much they resemble their deceased loved ones. “You all look like twins,” he says to a daughter who is about to bury her 100-year-old mother. “You couldn’t have denied this child if you wanted to,” he informs a mother of a fallen 19-year-old. It’s the exact opposite of how we’re taught to confront someone who has suffered a tragedy—deflect and dispense platitudes. Yet it’s exactly what each woman wants to hear because it confirms how deep and obvious her connection is to the departed. When he’s filming commercials and insisting that his staff coordinate their wardrobes, it’s easy to miss that this man cares about much more than mere appearances.
