For the first time since I moved out of the house in Ballard, I've been thinking I need more TV channels. I had a couple hundred channels there, thanks to DirecTV, and only basic cable since, but I didn't really miss anything.
But that was before I met the reapers.
A lot of people have been saying for a while now that the best weekly TV programs are on the pay channels. I've never seen Sex and the City or Six Feet Under or The Sopranos, but most shows don't get the kind of raves and followings these shows do unless there's something to them. Still, I wasn't inspired to go looking for new TV options.
While my back was particularly sore and I was spending most of my time lying on it, I rented a lot of DVDs to keep myself occupied. I picked up the pilot episode of Dead Like Me purely on a whim, not really sure what I was going to get. But I was bored, Hollywood Video's selection sucks, and it looked like it was worth a try.
The premise: George (short for Georgia) is an 18-year-old high school dropout who doesn't really know what she wants from life and doesn't feel particularly interested in figuring it out. And then it turns out she isn't going to get the chance anyway, because a toilet seat from the deorbiting Mir station strikes and kills her.
It furthermore turns out that with the extraction of her soul from her body (done, when possible, just before death rather than after, to allow the soul to maintain a certain level of dignity), a Grim Reaper has filled his quota and George now has to take his place. She joins a quartet of other reapers working Seattle's "outside influences" department, which handles death by murder, suicide and accident. Her boss, Rube (sort of "middle management" in the death business) receives a list, slipped under his door every night; every morning, he and the rest of the Reapers meet at Der Waffle Haus for breakfast, and he passes out their daily assignments on Post-It notes.
To add insult to terminal injury, it turns out being a Reaper doesn't pay, so George has to decide whether to live like some of her new coworkers, by taking valuables off the bodies of the dead, or to get a job.
The show spends about two-thirds of its time dealing with George and the other Reapers, and about one-third of its time dealing with George's family, and the ways in which they deal (or, much of the time, don't deal) with her death. And it does some truly excellent work on both fronts.
I found myself surprised at how taken I was with a show that's rooted in a concept that I essentially reject: life after death, the existence of a soul, and what happens to it when the body's gone. As a guy who's pretty sure we're just meat and bone, and nothing more than food for worms after we die, I expected to be kind of annoyed by the show once I discovered what it was about. But instead, I was completely taken, and after a little while, I realized why: it's because this show isn't about death and an afterlife at all. It's about the life we're living right now; it just uses George's "undead" existence to provide a different perspective on it. The question of where the souls George collects go after they walk into their lights is entirely irrelevant to the show. What's important is what George comes to understand about these people before they die; what she comes to realize about her own short life, and the parts of it she'll never get to live; what happens to her family in the wake of their daughter's death.
In the midst of it all, the show manages to generate some pretty excellent humor, as well.
Pick up the first season DVD's. You won't regret it.
Man Out of Time: Boom Boom Ba
http://www.manoutoftime.org/article.php?story=20040725084740714