Reap Thoughts

For many months now, I've slowly been working my way through the TV series Dead Like Me for the first time. It aired on Showtime just shy of 10 years ago, running only two seasons before being canceled. It's the story of an 18-year-old girl killed in a freak accident, who is then drafted to become a grim reaper. Her job is to "collect souls" of people about to die, and lead them to the beginning of their respective afterlifes. She works with a team of reapers, led by Mandy Patinkin, and including Callum Blue (from The Tudors) and Jasmine Guy (from A Different World, if your memory goes back that far).

My interest in the show was due to the man who created it, Bryan Fuller. He's the mind who created Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies, two other delightfully quirky (and wonderful) shows that were also cancelled very quickly. Dead Like Me feels very much like the spiritual predecessor of those two shows. It has the whimsical take on death that was a hallmark of Pushing Daisies, and a curmudgeonly young heroine like the one featured in Wonderfalls. Yet while Dead Like Me is enjoyable, it's not as good as either of those successors.

Perhaps this is due to the fact that for Bryan Fuller, the show ended even sooner than two seasons. After only a half-dozen episodes of the first season, he and Showtime parted ways over creative differences. Two other staff writers took over "show runner" duties for the remaining 20-or-so episodes that got made. The overall tone does remain the same; there's no sharp break in the format partway into the first season. But the show does become somewhat repetitious. It spends a lot of time with the heroine's surviving family, trying to deal with the grief of her death. This is tough to invest in as a viewer, since the family rarely interacts with the reapers, the main element of the show.

And as for the reapers... well, it's kind of the same thing, week in and week out. It's fluffy and fun, like a tasty dessert. Occasionally, a more profound statement is made about life and death. But mostly, the show is all about presenting the "quirky death of the hour" -- a gimmick Pushing Daisies did with much greater emotional impact. It's not that Dead Like Me is a bad show. It's just not as good, and not a show to chain-view on DVD, one episode right after the next. The one-a-week pace of its original TV airing feels like the better way to take it in, in my view.

The DVD set of the complete series also includes a TV movie that was made years after the show's cancellation, a possible attempt to revive the series and continue it. I was warned by friends who had seen it that it was pretty lame in comparison to the show itself -- in fact, so strongly and so often that when I finally got around to watching it, my expectations were at rock bottom and I therefore didn't think it was that bad. But it did have an awful lot of lame "buys" it asked of the audience. Mandy Patinkin was on Criminal Minds, unavailable to return (if he'd even wanted to), so his pivotal character from the original series is indecorously disposed of off-screen. Another character is re-cast with a different actress who is far less suited to the role. And yet, from a writing standpoint, the movie does a better job of integrating separate storylines than the show was doing during its original run. And it includes a couple choice scenes that land with stronger emotion that most episodes of the series.

Overall, I'd grade the full package of Dead Like Me a B. If you enjoyed Wonderfalls or Pushing Daisies, then it's definitely something to check out. You'll enjoy it; less, but you will enjoy it. Of course, if you haven't seen either of those other shows, I'd steer you to them instead.