Last night I watched Dead Like Me. It’s a television series that was on Showtime, I think. This is one of the frustrating things about having the NetFlix one at a time plan–I wanted to see more episodes, but I didn’t have disks three and four for Season One. There are some episodes up on the website that I can watch, but I’d rather watch on my television than my computer.
Anyway, Dead Like Me is about an 18-year-old girl, George (short for Georgia), who gets killed and discovers that she’s a Reaper. That means that she takes the souls of people who die out of their bodies. The leader of this group of Reapers passes out the assignments on yellow Post-It notes. She doesn’t like her job and doesn’t want it. She questions everything and disobeys rules all the time. The Reapers are dead, but not dead and so they need places to live and money to live on. The job comes without a salary.
Disk 1 was the pilot episode and that was it. It was okay, but not hugely interesting to me. I was going to stop watching there, but the premise of the series was so intriguing, I decided to try Disk 2. I enjoyed the next five episodes much more. George is struggling with her job. She doesn’t want people to die and constantly searches for ways around it. Only that never works and the repercussions are usually high.
IMO the fact that George is 18 when she dies makes the questioning and her trying to keep everyone alive believable. She doesn’t understand yet that death is a natural part of life and that it’s not necessarily fair.
The other part of the series I’m finding interesting is her family. The series jumps to her sister and mother regularly (the father just largely seems absent, both physically and emotionally) and shows how they’re reacting. The mother is a piece of work, but after six episodes, I’m starting to understand why she is how she is. The little sister is the one really having difficulty with George’s death and it feels as if she has no one she can turn to because the mother is so shut off.
Anyway, I enjoyed the five episodes I watched last night enough to get the next disk. The only downside is one of the Reapers in the last episode was replaced and I really dislike the new one. She’s just walking all over George. I’m hoping this woman is only temporary or that George will kick her out of her apartment and we’ll get less of the blond chick. If not, I might be stopping with disk 3.
Many of the walk-through characters (mostly bad guys) all have the names of major league players. Hey, desperate measures, right? And I had the games on anyway for the playoffs.
