Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Soil’ On Netflix, A Belgian Dramedy About A Muslim’s Unique Solution To A Problem Unique Moroccans In Europe

It’s hard to mine humor while depicting the funeral business, even though it would make sense that most people who deal with family grief and preparing the dead for interment would have a dark sense of humor. But we’ve never seen a show about a death-related business unique to the Muslim community, who do all the legwork involved with repatriating people back to their home countries for burial. Thanks to Netflix, now we have a dramedy about such a business. 

SOIL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We see a coffin at the bottom of a grave, only with everything going in reverse. Dirt returns to shovels, the casket gets raised instead of lowered, etc.

The Gist: Ismael Boulasmoum (Yassine Ouaich) talks in voice over about when he was a kid, back in 2006. His mother died and one of her last wishes was to be buried in Belgium, close to her family, instead of her native Morocco. But right after she died, she was whisked away to her home country and buried there. “It’s tradition,” Ismael says, and pressure from her family forced his father to have her body repatriated to Morocco.

Ismael knows all about repatriation, since his parents owned a business that took care of all the details after someone died. It was called “Assurances Omar”, named after his father Omar (Ben Hamidou). Now, his sister Nadia (Ahlaam Teghadouini) and her husband Rachid (Saïd Boumazoughe) help Omar run the business. Rachid has big plans for the business after Omar retires; Omar is concerned that there is dampness behind some wallpaper. Rachid’s bright idea was to import soil from Morocco to make tiles.

The person who doesn’t care about the family business is Ismael. He and his best friend Jean-Baptiste (Ward Kerremans) think they’ll make their bank off one big idea. Jean-Baptiste has lots of them, like “pizza scissors,” which a loan officer finds utterly unimpressive, despite the friends’ elaborate pitch.

He’s shocked when, right before he leaves for Mecca and what the family thinks is retirement, Omar leaves half the business to Ismael. Also shocked? Rachid. He and Nadia have to share the other half, and he thinks that Ismael has done nothing to deserve such a big chunk. But Nadia thinks it’s going to be a motivator for Ismael to finally abandon his pie in the sky ideas and grow up.

Nadia pays her brother to drive a trailer full of a family’s belongings for a funeral in Morocco. But when another family, who is having a dispute about where to bury their patriarch, balks at Rachid’s repatriation cost, Ismael decides to offer the family his services to drive the body back to Morocco. One problem: When they come out of a gas station convenience store, the trailer with the stuff and the body is gone. Another problem: They need to get the body back to Brussels for burial.

Ismael and Jean-Baptiste manage to find the trailer at an impound yard, but getting the body back to Assurance Omar proves to be difficult. They have to rewash and rewrap the body and make sure they don’t breathe a word of this adventure to the family. But as Ismael tries to mediate a dispute about the burial location between the two sides of the family, he spies the crate of Moroccan dirt and has a brilliant idea: Offer to bury Moroccans in Belgium, but in Moroccan soil.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Six Feet Under, but with a lot less naval-gazing and morbid humor.

Our Take: At its heart, it feels like Soil (Original title: Grond) is a family dramedy, with commentary on traditions both religious and secular. The mechanics of the plot seem to matter less than the relationships. But the first episode didn’t really give us a good feel one way or the other, and we’re not sure if that’s just a function of needing to do a lot of exposition or if it’s an ominous sign for the rest of the season.

It doesn’t help that the show’s humor isn’t dark and morbid, but more situational goofy, like the elaborate pizza scissors pitch, or the fact that no one in the family has any idea why Jean-Baptiste is always hanging around. The idea is that Ismael and Jean-Baptiste are always trying to come up with big ideas, and Ismael goes with it because the last thing he wants to do is be a part of his family’s business. But when he does finally come up with a hit idea, it drags him further into the business than he likely wants to be.

That’s going to be where the show gets interesting. He shifts the business from repatriation to funeral planning, something his father never wanted. He and Rachid will be at odds, mainly because Rachid thinks Ismael is lazy and Ismael thinks Rachid is a money-hungry shark. There’s even drama when it comes to Omar, as we see in the final scene (see below).

So the shift in the repatriation business should just be a backdrop to the family drama; at least that’s what we hope. It’s an interesting backdrop, given the fact that repatriation of bodies is a business we’ve never heard of before. But we hope it doesn’t become the show’s focus.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Instead of being in Mecca, Omar checks himself into the hospital, looking for a doctor on the cardiovascular floor.

Sleeper Star: Ahlaam Teghadouini, who plays Nadia, is basically the only woman in the main cast and her role is a thankless one; she has to keep all the ridiculous men in her life from shooting themselves in the foot with their business decisions.

Most Pilot-y Line: Knowing how careful and respectful Muslims are when they prepare a body for funeral, the scenes where Ismael and Jean-Baptiste dropped the old man’s body and accidentally hit it against things made us cringe. This isn’t Weekend At Bernies; this was someone’s father.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Our recommendation of Soil is a marginal one, because we’re not sure if the series is going to really dig into the family drama or get bogged down in the entire repatriation business.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.