It can sometimes get lost in the noise generated by huge prestige shows like The Last of Us, which just finished its second season, but HBO doesn’t just make huge fictional series for people to follow. It’s also a great producer of documentaries, which are often just as influential and riveting to watch.
If you’re a true crime fan (and untold millions of people are, at this point), then you might want to pay attention to the show it just unveiled, which will come to HBO and its once again renamed streaming platform HBO Max on 1 June – The Mortician. It just got its first trailer, and it’s an interesting watch.
This is a limited series which doesn’t aim to take up your time for weeks on end. In fact, it’ll only run for three episodes in total. That doesn’t the show doesn’t have a lot to offer up, though. It looks like a pretty chilling examination of the psychology of one particular criminal, with testimony from his victims but also from the man himself.
Cremation can be a solemn act that plays a part in the cycle of remembrance, but it also involves a lot of trust in a mortician to do the job right. It transpires that back in the 1980s David Sconce was one of these morticians, but he was eventually discovered to be doing his job not just badly, but criminally.
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(Image credit: HBO)(Image credit: HBO)(Image credit: HBO)(Image credit: HBO)(Image credit: HBO)
Sconce was accused by his clients of ignoring their wishes, performing mass cremations instead of individual ones. This saved him a large amount of time and money, but was fairly obviously a huge act of disrespect, as well as a professional lie – and it looks like it eventually got him caught. That said, the trailer hints that he also got up to far more unbelievable exploits, too.
With access to Sconce himself in interviews, as well as his victims and those who investigated him, this looks like a comprehensive recap of the almost unbelievable story of what he did. He presumably participated in the hope of exonerating himself to some degree, but in the trailer he mostly comes across terribly.
Diverse content like this is what makes HBO Max (or Sky Atlantic and Now here in the UK) one of the best streaming platforms out there – add it to your watchlist if you think you could get a kick out of it in June.
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