Hugh Kretschmer They're the real thing in "Family Plots": In front, from left, David Moravee, Emily Vigney, Rick Sadler, John Greeney and Shonna Smith. In the back are Chuck Wissmiller and Melissa Wissmiller. Click photo for larger image. "FAMILY PLOTS" When: 9 tonight on A&E, with a second episode airing at 9:30. Featuring: Rick Sadler.

To concoct A&E's new funeral home "reality" series "Family Plots," just mix a heaping helping of HBO's "Six Feet Under" with a dash of Showtime's "Dead Like Me" (the "Family Plots" theme song, "Hell" by Squirrel Nut Zippers, was used in the marketing of "Dead Like Me").

Voila, insta-show.

"Family Plots," premiering tonight at 9 with two back-to-back half-hour episodes, follows the activities of the staff at San Diego's Poway Bernardo Mortuary, including three sisters and their father.

Rick Sadler, a 1964 Bethel Park High School graduate, isn't a member of the immediate family, but he heads the cast as general manager of the mortuary. He's a third-generation funeral director. His great-grandfather ran a mortuary in Sewickley.

"My earliest childhood memory was in an apartment upstairs [of the funeral home] in Sewickley," Sadler said. His father later took a job with the Harold Connell funeral home on Library Avenue in Bethel Park (now Beinhauer-Connell Funeral Service Co.). Sadler, who left Pittsburgh after graduating from high school and hasn't been back since, began working there at age 13, mowing the lawn and cleaning windows. Eventually he worked his way up to assist with the embalming process.

"I was compelled; it was my life's mission, if you will. I was destined to be a funeral director," Sadler said. "Most of us, and I'm talking about the 100,000 funeral directors in the United States, are compassionate caregivers. Maybe on some level we have a need to show the love and care and compassion to the families we serve. On another level, you might even say you can be a little bit of an adrenaline junkie, because it's high stress, high pressure and fast-paced."

Sadler said he's not wild about tonight's premiere episode of "Family Plots." He said producers took everything that went wrong in a three-month period and crammed it into the premiere. That includes a funeral that's almost forgotten. He prefers the second episode, airing tonight at 9:30, which shows embalmer Shonna Smith trying to reconstruct the face of an elderly woman who died in an auto accident (nothing gruesome is shown). The family of the deceased allowed themselves to be filmed, which surprised Sadler, who estimated that 80 percent of the time grieving families did not object to the presence of cameras.

"I didn't think they'd have any families say yes," he said, adding that ultimately families viewed it as an opportunity to discuss the loss of a loved one. "That's an important part of the grieving and healing process. We would be done with a family in terms of arranging the funeral, and they'd be here an hour later, talking to the cameras."

Sadler acknowledged that agreeing to turn his funeral home into the set of a reality show was a risk, but after consulting with fellow funeral directors, he thought it was a unique opportunity to let the public see how funeral directors do their jobs.

"Americans are disassociated from the process of death and dying and the process of the disposition of human remains," Sadler said. "In Nairobi, when someone dies, you take them out in the backyard, bathe them and bury them.

"In the United States, you pick up the phone and call a funeral director, but you don't know what really happens. This lets the door open to see the actual process and how much we care and how devoted we are to what we do."