Bright Water MI (GSP). In a glorious rebirth and an extreme take on Chef Gordon Ramsay’s highly successful “Kitchen Nightmares,” embalmist-necrophilogist Dr. Amar Pastel will be on television tonight for the premiere of his “Funeral Nightmares” reality program.
Pastel visits struggling funeral homes, investigates why the business is having trouble and offers advice on how to turn it around. GSP has an exclusive insider’s peek at Friday’s premiere: Hitzeman Funeral Home. You’ll witness heated exchanges, amazing transformations and a brand new look at how the dead survive… and the families that don’t. Plus, there’ll be a surprise funeral guest you won’t want to miss.
Warning: Spoiler Alert
The opening scene has Pastel rolling in on a bright red Razor scooter to the Hitzeman Funeral Home in Bright Water, Michigan. As he takes off his big helmet, and with almond-oil hair glistening in the sun, he exclaims to the camera in a fake British accent, “This isn’t much to look at, is it? My dear, it looks like Denny’s or at the very least, an Irish pub… nothing at all like a proper funeral parlor, yes?”
He meets the colorful family who runs the business, but probably spends more time bickering with each other than dressing up corpses. There’s Hugh Hitzeman, a tawdry chap who installed a keg in the basement next to the embalming fluids because he thought it would “lift morale.” And there’s Frances Hitzeman, his nagging wife who insists to “test drive” the outfits and caskets before a body gets in them. Finally, their two adult children, Jennifer and Hayden, are more concerned with pimping out the hearse and playing with the dead bodies than they are about taking their jobs as driver and embalmer seriously.
The Hitzeman family steals the show and their interactions with Dr. Pastel make for legendary and inspired reality television. Pastel arrives and meets the family. He then sits in on a funeral to see how the business is run. A 94 year old woman named Ruth lies in state during the wake and her family is furious with the Hitzeman’s for putting the wrong glasses on her face, dressing her in a floral print sundress (Herbert, her son, screams at the camera that “the worms won’t even touch her with such a fashion faux-pas!”) and the flippant way Jennifer and Hayden throw kleenex boxes at them, uttering such inappropriate things as, “Haven’t you had enough time to cry?” and “She was 900 years old – what do you expect?” The family is also outraged by the horrible embalming job done on Ruth who looks more like a dead pigeon than an elderly woman in the prime of her life. When the family leaves, Pastel strolls over to Ruth’s body and leans in and gives her kiss on each cheek, saying, “nice to see you, yes?”
Yes, Pastel is horrified by the lack of respect shown to their clients. He also had the opportunity to observe them interact with new clients. A family comes in mourning the loss of their elderly great-grandfather and Hugh is too distracted and disorganized to give them any attention at all, instead paying attention to his pet parrot, Stuart, who repeats, “Caw! Caw! Get in the ground, ya old poop!” at the most comedic moments.
Pastel then travels down to the “Slice Room”, an undertaker’s term for where the bodies are prepared. Shocked by the deplorable conditions, including a keg-erator next to the formaldehyde, the stink of rotting flesh and friendly rats that gnaw at the fingers of the dead, Pastel shuts the funeral home down for the night, turning many disappointed clients away. Citing “serious public health threats” and accusing them of trying to kill people (“are you trying to drum up business for yourself, yes?”), Pastel’s fury is dramatized with quick cuts and insinuations that he is a pervert.
After scrubbing down the entire workspace, and throwing the remaining cadavers out for the maggots, Pastel is finally ready to get to work. He makes Hayden come up with a new embalming fluid recipe, urging him to “have some fun in the Slicing Room” and wanting him to experiment and mix exciting new chemicals and preservatives to make a totally new embalming fluid everyone can enjoy and inject some magic back into Hitzeman Funeral Home. Pastel is pleased with the results saying that the embalming fluid is “fresh, exciting and vibrant with lovely hues and excellent flavor, yes?” and announces that the new embalming fluid is ready to be released on the next body that comes through the Doors of Death.
Pastel then helps Jennifer update her hearse, to make it more appropriate for toting around dead bodies. He replaces the chain-link steering wheel with a steering wheel shaped like a young boy’s behind dressed in a speedo, and gets rid of the decals of Calvin and Hobbes peeing on a gravestone. He spruces the rest up with an elegant sign on each door that says, “Hitzeman Gives Free Candy to Young Children Wearing Speedos.”
Pastel then offers sex tips and intercourse counseling to both Hugh and Frances, on several nights actually getting into bed with them. By the end Hugh and Frances say Pastel “rocked their world” and said the sex has never been better thanks to the perverted tips Pastel demonstrated for and on them. "He saved our marriage... and our orgasms!" they exclaim.
Finally, on the last day, after an infectious diarrhea ripped through a local funeral home, Hitzeman’s was ready for re-launch. Despite some initial hiccups, the staff and the family came together, as Pastel constantly urged them to “take control of your business, yes?” with extremely flamboyant hand gestures. The day was a complete success and Pastel exhorts them, “don’t stop, yes?”
Spoiler ends here.
“Funeral Nightmares” can be seen this Friday at 8:00pm on FOX.
