Dead Like Me: The Complete Series - Bryan Fuller

Claiming that Dead Like Me is from Bryan Fuller is a little misleading. As Wikipedia will tell you, he left the show shortly after it started because of arguments with Showtime about where the show was headed and it seems personality conflicts. This is noteworthy because like all of his other works, Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies, Dead Like Me seemed headed for early cancellation right from the start. Dead Like Me is also similar to his other shows in that it cultivated a small but devoted following, and combined this with moderate critical claim.

But to fully discuss the fate of this show I need to take a step back and discuss the show itself. As the image above hints, this show is about grim reapers. A young college dropout named Georgia Lass (played by Ellen Muth) is hit by a flaming toilet seat that broke off from a space station during the lunch break of her mind numbing temp job. It just so happens that her death coincides with the 'retirement' of the grim reaper that took her soul, and the job is passed to her. She soon meets up with the rest of the 'external influence' reapers in Seattle and begins her afterlife as a grim reaper.

If the above description makes the show sound dark, it's because the premise is misleading. Although it is all about death, the show mostly takes a lighthearted and quirky approach to the heavy subject, even though it does have some serious and dramatic moments. As you can imagine, the 'external influences' death department deals with all sorts of wacky and unexpected deaths (along with the occasional murders) that lets the show embrace its quirk. Normally I kind of cringe when you can tell shows or movies are trying to be quirky, but this show does it in a subtle enough way that it actually works. Trying to figure out how the victim dies in the upcoming scene is morbidly fun. The viewer doesn't know how the person will die, because even the reapers only get a name and a time of death. There are many entertaining scenes in which the main characters sit around guessing in what kind of freak accidents the various people passing by will die.

It's the character interactions that really make this a memorable show. The 'external influence' death department only consists of 5 reapers so we get to know them all pretty well. There is the aforementioned newcomer Georgia Lass, the drug addict/grifter Mason, the badass parking attendant Roxy, the movie starlet wannabe Daisy, and father figure Rube. The best scenes of the show revolve around the groups daily morning meetings at 'Der Waffle House' to get their daily assignments from Rube.

Although many episodes focus on Mason and Daisy, Rube and Roxy are easily the best characters. Rube (Mandy Patinkin, known by many as Inigo Montoya from 'The Princess Bride') is the centerpiece of this show and takes it from being merely entertaining to really good. It might be because he can act circles around the rest of the cast (except possibly Jasmine Guy as Roxy) but Rube brings a much-needed gravitas to the show. It's not that he's overly serious, he has some of the funniest lines of the show while taking every chance to cut down Mason, but his mysterious background and overall enigmatic persona help make the show interesting.

Other characters in the show include Georgia's lamenting family, and her coworkers at her day job. The show cleverly plays with the idea of a dead girl living in her hometown, and has her interact with people she knew while alive. To get around the obvious issues involved here, the show introduces the idea that reapers look different to the living than they did while alive. This lets Georgia hang around her old family to see how they cope with her death and how they move on with their lives. Although this sounds like a possibly interesting subplot, I found the family to be a little dull.

Another interesting aspect of Georgia's afterlife is that although she gets to live for the foreseeable future, she has to pay for rent and other aspects of living with our society. Thus she has to get a desk job at the Happy Time temp agency. Georgia's interactions with her coworkers (especially her boss Dolores and the secretary Crystal) evolve as the show goes on and they develop quite a rapport. This was one area of the show that I felt could have been improved by having more episodes. The cat-loving Dolores and 'more than meets the eye' Crystal had a lot of room to grow and I would have been interested to see where their characters were headed.

The collection contains a straight to video sequel to the show that falls flat on its face. As with the later part of the series, Bryan Fuller had nothing to do with the movie. In addition Mandy Patinkin declined to appear in the movie and the actress who played Daisy (Laura Harris, who played the villainous Marie Warner in season 2 of 24) was busy at the time. Although Daisy was not necessarily my favorite character, the replacement actress (who interestingly enough played Marie's sister Kate in 24) was awful as Daisy. The movie didn't have the humor of the show, and didn't help itself by not staying true to many of the characters and having a sloppily put together plot. Let's move on.

I think Dead Like Me holds an interesting place in television in that it would have been helped by not being on Showtime, but on a major network. The show works mostly as procedural, which is what many networks crave. The best premium cable shows are continuity heavy and require sequential viewing on the network or on DVD. Dead Like Me could easily be casually viewed, and is well written enough to have survived on a major network. I haven't seen his other shows, but I don't think anyone will claim that Bryan Fuller's shows are the best shows of all time. If Dead Like Me is any indication of his other work, Fuller makes fun, entertaining shows that combine the best parts of comedies and dramas, and have a definite place in the TV landscape.