There are certain things that you have to wonder if they were spawned into existence just to appeal to you specifically. It’s always a little strange when it happens, wondering if someone poked into your psyche and hit print.

It’s especially weird when said thing was made when you were only three and didn’t even know it would be something that would appeal to you. Suppose it’s like they say, every art finds its audience eventually.

Dead Like Me is a two season show created by Bryan Fuller (of Pushing Daisies and Hannibal fame) with a deceptively simple pitch: a recently deceased eighteen year old must now figure out the ins and outs of being a Grim Reaper. Over the course of 29 episodes, our protagonist George must cope with the revelations of her particular brand of afterlife that happened to be handed to her.

I’m a sucker for Death personifications. Ask anyone who knows me, Death as an entity you can chat, fight, bicker, and love if you’re feeling cheeky is my weak spot in fiction. There’s just something… comforting about it, Something that I can’t help but be a little enamored with. I’ve also realized that I’ve got a soft spot for “Death as Bureaucracy”. It stands to reason that if the only certainties are death and taxes and our world continues to grow ever more complicated, it only makes sense that sometimes Death (the guy or the process) has to go and outsource with employees and everything. 

Most of the time with a pitch like that the Reapers in question would have some minor abilities to help with the whole “taking souls process” either by being invisible to the average person or being able to teleport or what have you. Here, it’s hardly portrayed as aspirational: you have no abilities other than the one used to take souls which means relying on the transport around you. Not to mention the lack of pay means you’ve still gotta find a day job for rent, food, and the rest of life or unlife’s necessities.It’s like… an involuntary volunteer position. Oh yeah, the only way to get the gig is to accidentally be another reaper’s last soul. Something reaper’s don’t know until it happens.

Because this show was made in 2003, it still has a couple of media hangups from the 90s that hadn’t quite fallen out of popular favor yet, making rewatching it something of an oddity. I don’t know if it’s the twenty-something crisis in me, but watching this show by way of apathetic George try to knock the monotony of office work, a work that is at least stable if not interesting, when I would kill for the sort of mundanity is I think the result of the late stage capitalism of it all, but is definitely a disconnect that’s only gotten worse with each rewatch I suspect. It’s not a complaint, in fact this show gets a good chunk of mileage out of the comparisons between George’s reaper life and her attempts to pretend to be “normal” at her job. 

As one can imagine, this is a lot to try and get a grip on when you’re freshly dead and 18 years old who was already feeling plenty aimless in life when a freak, not to mention embarrassing, accident forces you to confront all of your seeming failings of life in rapid succession.  George is perhaps not the most likable protagonist, but she is deeply human. With more smarts than tact sometimes, a fact her mother seemed to kind of resent her for after her death.

Of course, while George may feel alone and isolated metaphorically and perhaps metaphysically, she isn’t literally.  She’s got a small squad of reapers who are doing her best to take her in and show her the ropes of how to survive this particular flavor of afterlife. She’s being mentored by Rube, a hardass with a heart of gold played… for lack of a better word warmly, by Mandy Patinkin, the rock in the river of Roxy, the chaotic sibling figure in Mason (look, I understand that Daisy’s shallow and George is probably (?) too young, and it might just be my taste in men, but Callum Blue is cute! Mason’s cute! I’m tired of pretending he isn’t!), and the complicated girls of both Betty and Daisy, and that’s just on the Reaper side of the deal. Seeing as she still has to work a day job with her sometimes overly perky boss Delores Herbig. The flaw with them is the same with a lot of protagonist driven ensemble shows, they get to exist alongside our main character, but everyone’s attachment styles just seem incompatible. 

It’s a show about coping, with life and with death, with regrets, and with what ripple effects the sudden change of the the loss of life can bring. The sort of “B-Plot” of the whole series is George’s surviving family (mother Joy, father Clancy, and sister Reggie) all try and deal with (or avoid dealing with) George’s death. They’re… also not always likable, but they are deeply human. Besides, grief hardly makes people likable, but it does make them compelling. There’s Reggie and her desire to take all the toilet seats in the neighborhood and sudden interest in taxidermy, there’s Clancy’s infidelity that was originally going to be about him being a closeted gay man before Bryan Fuller left the project and it became about him sleeping with one of his students. I’d like to say “it was 2003, what could you do” but all I can think is “damn, networks think and or thought that’s the better midlife crisis option?” And there’s Joy’s attempts to understand her family, while being… a smidge too repressed to really connect with any of them in the way they need it.

 The best way I can describe them is the same way I’d describe a lot of characters with mismatched backgrounds doing their best: a handful of coping mechanisms bouncing off each other like pinballs. As a viewer you want them to get better, but you have to admit they’re more compelling when they’re flawed. 

All characters I like are like that, sometimes you want to grab them by the shoulders and shake them, either hoping their poor coping mechanisms fall out or while yelling “go to therapy”. But then you know you would love them less. I suppose that’s the titular venn diagram, “shows with fantastical yet grounded premises” and “a cast of deeply flawed characters who are utterly compelling”. The “Death as a bureaucratic job one can achieve in the afterlife.” is just a happy bonus. (And also surprisingly my preferred afterlife.)