"We all die - some of us sooner than later. For me, it's going to be much sooner. But that's only the beginning of my story." - Ellen Muth as Georgia "George" Lass
Dead Like Me: The Complete First Season DVD Review
By Jonathan Boudreaux
College dropout Georgia "George" Lass (Ellen Muth) is having a bad day. Her mother, Joy (Cynthia Stevenson), thinks she's a loser. Her kid sister, Reggie (Britt McKillip), is bothersome. Her emotionally distant father, Clancy (Greg Kean), is a college professor who may be having an affair with a student. Her new temp job consists of soulless, mind numbing drudgework. Oh, and she's about to die, smashed to bits at the ripe old age of eighteen by a toilet seat hurtled from space by a disintegrating Russian space station. Can things possibly get any worse? Well, yes, as a matter of fact, they can, because as George quickly discovers, the afterlife, too, is filled with bothersome, emotionally distant people and soulless, mind numbing drudgework. Welcome to Paradise!
After being beaned by the rogue space junk, George learns that through a fateful quirk, she is now expected to become a reaper, one of the undead cosmic civil servants who are charged with removing souls from deceased bodies. While the souls she helps to free will ascend to an unknowable (but presumably better) place, George will be stuck fulfilling her reaper duties until she has met her equally unknowable quota. George is to be part of the "External Influences" team, which covers murders, accidents, suicide, and other unnatural causes. Gruff but caring Rube (Mandy Patinkin) is the team's leader. He receives lists of the soon-to-be deceased from a mysterious shadowy figure, copies the info to yellow Post-It notes, and hands out the assignments to his staff: Betty (Rebecca Gayheart), Mason (Callum Blue), and Roxy (Jasmine Guy).
In their past lives, Betty was an adventurous flapper who died when jumping off of a cliff into a too-shallow river, Mason was a Brit stoner who drilled a hole in his head while pursuing a high, and Roxy was a talented Flashdance-esque performer who invented leg warmers but was strangled by her jealous roommate (who used leg warmers as the murder weapon, natch). Each joined the team when they had the misfortune of filling the quotas of the individual reapers who freed their souls. Although to each other they appear as they did when they were alive, they now look completely different to the living, thus allowing them to do their reaping without attracting too much attention. In episode five, risk-taking Betty decides to forcibly leap to the next world, tagging along with a soul that she has freed. With Betty gone, her place on the team is filled by Daisy (Laura Harris), a former Hollywood starlet.
Needless to say, George is not thrilled by her new duties. She HATES being dead - why would she want to facilitate the deaths of other innocent people? She is even less thrilled when she realizes that reaping doesn't pay, so she has to find job to support herself. She reluctantly accepts a job at Happy Time Temporary Services, the same agency that got her the crappy temp job that inadvertently led to her death. (She was on her thirty-five minute "lunch hour" when the flaming toilet seat re-entered the atmosphere). The job at Happy Time is just as mind numbing, but this time she also has to put up with her weird boss, Dolores Herbig (Christine Willes), and the agency's even weirder receptionist, Crystal (Crystal Dahl).
The main thrust of the show is how George's death has forced her to wake up to life. Until she died, George basically walked through life like a zombie, ignoring both her family and the world around her. At her funeral, it becomes evident that she lacked even the most casual of friends. Observing her family as the outsider she now is, George realizes how much she loves her bitchy mother, her distracted father, and her annoying sister.and how little she showed that love when she was alive. When we first met Reggie, she was a disembodied pair of glasses hovering in the air, illustrating how completely George ignored her younger sister. Reggie's odd post-funeral behavior - she takes up taxidermy and steals toilet seats from neighbors in order to hang them Christmas-like in a secluded tree near her home - shows Georgia how much the youngster observed even while she was being ignored. Georgia longs to fix her past mistakes, but it is now too late. As Rube points out, "life is too short and death is too long."
Dead Like Me was created by Bryan Fuller, who went on to pen Fox's short lived, critically acclaimed Wonderfalls. Wonderfalls, which lasted a mere four episodes this spring, followed a Niagara Falls-based slacker whose life is changed (for the better or the worse, depending on how one looks at it) when the inanimate objects sold at her souvenir shop begin speaking to her, extolling her to perform a series of seemingly unrelated tasks. Both shows have similar sensibilities, so fans of Wonderfalls should give Dead Like Me a shot until the DVD gods deign to release the unaired episodes of their favorite show on disc. From their quirky concepts to their snarky, jaded attitudes, the shows have much in common and provide similar pleasures. Both feature strong (yet reluctant) heroines as their leads. George and Wonderfalls' Jaye (Caroline Dhavernas) are serial underachievers who are forced by the universe to live up to their untapped potential. Both shows also explore the seemingly incompatible themes of simultaneously being alone and isolated while having your actions felt on an almost universal scale.
Another trait that both shows share is their depiction of an almost pathological ambivalence towards jobs and careers. Wonderfalls' Jaye is an Ivy League graduate who lacks ambition and is so unmotivated that she resigns herself to working a crappy retail job. She cannot bring herself to find a job that will bring her more self-respect, but at the same time, she treats her job with such contempt that she even loses out on a management promotion to a "mouth breather." George seems bright, but, as she says, "'some college' seemed like enough." Dead Like Me, especially, has fun depicting the casual horrors of working life. Happy Time is filled with workers who pretend to be happy and content in order to stay sane in their unexciting workplace. As George's boss, Dolores Herbig ("as in 'her big brown eyes'"), Christine Willes perfectly captures self-delusional perkiness. (Dahl's stone faced, dour receptionist Crystal is also a standout. The sight of Crystal licking other workers' phones to spread germs is priceless). Days at Happy Time - and almost every other workplace depicted on the series, including that of the reapers - are filled with sunny despair: endless, unfulfilling tasks that inevitably are meaningless. Even George notices that "it is my karmic destiny to do paperwork. Where ever I go, I'm a temp." The series' work-related humor is funny and incisive. It will surely strike a chord with most viewers.
Dead Like Me is far from perfect. There are several holes in premise, but these can be easily ignored. It is, after all, a series about grim reapers, so it calls for a little suspension of disbelief. The holes are also less noticeable on second viewing. The series' worst flaw is its repetition. In the first few episodes, George seems to learn the same lessons over and over again. While it is understandable that she is a reluctant reaper, those early episodes feature too many plotlines that involve her trying to trick death into letting some of her assignments live. At the end of each episode, she is put in her place and presumably is resigned to the fact that death is inevitable and unavoidable, but then this is forgotten in the next episode when she tempts fate yet again. Because of this, George does not so much feel rebellious as she does simple. The series also makes the mistake of featuring an episode comprised mostly of clips ("Nighthawks"). Clip shows should be banned outright from series TV, but this episode is especially irrelevant since it is only the twelfth episode of a fourteen episode first season. It is hard (and unnecessary) to get nostalgic about episodes that premiered only a few weeks before.
These minor quibbles can be overlooked thanks in part to the work of the show's immensely likeable cast. As George, Muth displays just right amount of vulnerability and sardonic wit, wryly underplaying scenes that most other actors would approach with much less subtly. McKillip is perfectly cast as Reggie. She is able to convey exactly how much George influenced her impressionable younger sister. Yet Reggie is no clone since McKillip is able to filter those influences through Reggie's own unique personality. The gifted Stevenson manages to achieve the next to impossible task of portraying a hard, demanding character who still manages to earn our sympathy despite her brusque attitude. Patinkin's performance has a similar effect.
The fourteen episodes that make up the first season are divided onto four discs. The discs are housed in slim, clear keepcases. Because the cases are clear, the double-sided coversheets show through to the inside of the cases and are printed with large, spiffy-looking photos from the series. The inside of the case holding the first disc, for example, features a photo of George looking up at sister Reggie's toilet seat-covered tree. The pictures continue on the faces of the discs, which perfectly blend in with the images behind them. The front covers of the cases are decorated with bright, sunny images of black shrouded grim reapers in everyday situations - punching the time clock, playing golf (with a scythe for a golf club), working out at the gym, and doing laundry. In case you were wondering, grim reapers, too, are prone to turning their whites a sickly shade of pink. These images, taken from the opening credits sequence, perfectly capture the tone of the series. The backs of the cases list the episode numbers, episode titles, approximate running times, and brief synopses of the discs' episodes. The four thin cases slide into a cardboard sleeve, which is in turn wrapped in a clear plastic sleeve featuring a picture of a bubblegum-blowing reaper.
Viewers have the option of playing all of the episodes on a disc or choosing an individual one. The episodes are divided into chapters. The disc menus make simple use of character photos and Post-It notes.
