Not everyone turns to humor to cope with the sad, serious, and personal event that is a funeral. But if you run a funeral home — if your full-time job is dealing with strangers’ death and grief every single day — it seems like having a decent sense of humor is a matter of mental-health survival. For the most entertaining example of that, check out the trailer Netflix released today for its new reality series Buried by the Bernards, which debuts Friday, February 12. The series centers on the family behind R Bernard Funeral Services in Memphis, Tennessee, known locally for offering “complete yet affordable funeral packages†to help the community “deal with exponentially high funeral costs.†On top of that, they offer drive-through viewings, their commercials are funny, and they’ve been featured on The Steve Harvey Show. So, yeah, they’ve built up a pretty solid résumé that’s deserving of the reality-show treatment. According to a local Memphis news report from January 23, the eight-episode series was filmed just before COVID-19 hit, from January through March 2020.
Be warned that the trailer for Buried by the Bernards does feature dead bodies — thankfully, though, they’re covered up, with the exception of one dead person’s foot. When you’re filming a reality show in a funeral home, these things are unavoidable. Anyway, we’re calling it now: Uncle Kevin is about to be Twitter’s next big meme.