"Life sucks and then you die. And then it.still sucks." - Ellen Muth as Georgia "George" Lass
Dead Like Me: The Complete Second Season DVD Review
By Jonathan Boudreaux
If you think your job blows, get a load of George Lass (Ellen Muth). In season one of Dead Like Me, the eighteen-year-old was killed by rogue space junk - a toilet seat, to be exact. But, there's no rest for the dead. Thanks to a quirk of the universe, George was chosen to become a reaper, an undead sort of civil servant responsible for harvesting souls from the soon-to-be deceased. It's cosmic drudgework. Even worse, George was forced to get a part-time job doing ordinary drudgework in order to support herself since reaping doesn't pay.
Season two of Dead Like Me is both better and worse than season one. As before, George juggles her time between her fellow reapers on the "External Influences" team - Rube (Mandy Patinkin), the team's gruff but paternal leader; Daisy (Laura Harris), a vain starlet who died on the set of Gone with the Wind; Mason (Callum Blue), a British rake who overdosed in the swinging '60s; and Roxy (Jasmine Guy), a no-nonsense meter maid who was murdered in the early '80s - and her slightly strange coworkers at Happy Time, the temp agency where she earns a living. George also tries to keep an eye on her unsuspecting family: father Clancy (Greg Kean), a college professor; mother Joy (Cynthia Stevenson), a high-strung homemaker; and sister Reggie (Britt McKillip), a morose eleven-year-old. The lives of the reapers are richer than in season one. We learn more about them, and in the process, the characters become more robust. Unfortunately, this happens at the expense of George's family, as the Lass family's storylines feel flat and lifeless this time around.
The character undergoing the greatest change is George. In season one, she spent much time rebelling against her new role as a reaper and mourning the fact that her life was cut short. Over the course of the second season, she becomes more accustomed to life after death:
"This is my perspective: I am a grim reaper. I take souls. I do not go to prom. I do not live happily ever after. Death is who I am. Anyone got a problem with that?"
She also begins to realize that the sarcasm and bitterness she uses as a shield against her pain prevents her from connecting with others. Her boss, Delores (Christine Willes), becomes a trusted friend rather than an object of ridicule. George even lets her guard down long enough to flirt with several cute guys and, in the process, lose her virginity.
Season two also fleshes out the characters of George's fellow reapers. Rube, who has always insisted that reapers should forget about their former lives, gets an interesting side story about his past that slowly unfolds throughout the season. (To give away too much about it would be unfair. Just know that the payoff is emotionally intense.) Daisy, who in the past was mostly content to recount stories of her sexual conquests with now-dead celebrities, finds religion in season two. Sure, she does so with a stolen crucifix, but she means well. Sort of. She also encounters evil in the form of her new boyfriend, TV producer Ray Summers (Will & Grace's Eric McCormack).
The reaper who grows the least is Roxy. Early in the season, the cranky meter maid is recruited by the police department and becomes a cop. Afterwards, she's still cranky, but with a gun. Jasmine Guy barely appears in some episodes. It's as if the writers didn't know what to do with her character - or chose not to do anything. Mason doesn't grow either, but somehow his shallowness is deeper this time around. Before, he was just a charming rascal. Now, his desperation is palpable. With his torn, scuzzy clothing and omnipresent bottle of liquor, he is so pathetic and grimy that we can practically smell him. We never quite know what will happen when Mason enters a scene, truly making him one of the season's most interesting characters.
As George spends more time with her reaper and work families, she begins to let go of the real family she was forced to leave behind. In the process, the storylines involving the Lass family become snooze-inducing. The first season presented a believable portrait of a family mourning the loss of a child and sibling. This season centers on the divorce of Joy and Clancy. The characters need to move on, of course, but the show's writers seemingly could not figure out how to smoothly transition them into another life phase. Even worse, the characters are barely likeable. Where Joy and Reggie were once complex, multilayered characters, they now come across as bitchy, peevish, and one dimensional.
The second season expertly weaves several story arcs over multiple episodes, and explores weighty issues like religion without seeming preachy. Yet at times the writing is annoyingly lazy. Three episodes feature distracting, unnecessary fart jokes. A character named "The Ted" in the episode "Hurry" is a witless rip-off of "The Todd" from Scrubs. Musicians also seem to die with alarming frequency, with no less than three dying over the course of the season, two of them in successive episodes.
Despite its flaws, Dead Like Me is still enormously entertaining - and, quite often, laugh-out-loud funny. Asked whether she's ever been to a gym, Daisy says, "I died in 1938. For exercise we drank sloe gin and smoked Lucky Strikes." Reggie doesn't see anything fun about picnics, complaining that "this is how homeless people eat." And try not to laugh when Crystal (Crystal Dahl), Happy Time's dour, stone-faced receptionist, points out her boyfriend to a horrified George.
As Rube indelicately tells an elementary school class while posing as a substitute teacher, "Everything and everyone dies." This also applies to TV shows: Showtime killed Dead Like Me after its second season. There was brief talk of producing new episodes for syndication, but these plans apparently fell through. On some level, the show's producers must have anticipated its cancellation. While the final episode doesn't exactly bring the show's various plotlines to a neat conclusion, it does manage to successfully bring the series to an emotionally sound end.
Season two's guest stars include comedian Shelley Berman, Neil Grayston (Wonderfalls' mouth breather), Michael Des Barres (WKRP in Cincinnati), Barbara Barrie (Barney Miller), Yeardley Smith (The Simpsons), singer Gavin DeGraw, and Brett Kelly (the booger-encrusted kid from Bad Santa).
The fifteen episodes that make up the second 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 publicity photos from the series. The inside of the case holding the first disc, for example, features a photo of George in a hospital with a gurney in the background. 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 images of the reapers. 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. Overall, the look of the packaging is similar to that of The Complete First Season, but without the clear plastic outer sleeve that encased the cardboard box.
The disc menus, which are reminiscent of those for season one, make simple use of character photos and Post-It notes. This time around, however, there is no "play all" feature.
