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Dead Like Me is an American television comedy-drama created by Bryan Fuller for the Showtime network starring Ellen Muth and Mandy Patinkin as grim reapers in Seattle, Washington. The series was inspired by the Piers Anthony novel On A Pale Horse.

Eighteen-year-old Georgia "George" Lass (played by Muth) is the show's protagonist and narrator. George dies early in the pilot episode, leaving her mother (Cynthia Stevenson) and rest of her family behind at a point when her relationships with them were on shaky ground. She is tapped to become one of the "undead", a grim reaper. She soon learns that a reaper's job is to remove the souls of people, preferably right before they die, and escort them until they move on into their afterlife. The show explores the "lives" and experiences of a small team of such reapers — a team led by Rube (played by Patinkin) — as well as the post-mortem changes in George and George's family as they deal with George's death.

Fuller, the show's creator, left early due to creative differences; he went on to co-create Wonderfalls and create Pushing Daisies. Creative direction of Dead Like Me was taken over by executive producer John Masius.

In New Zealand, the show's second season began airing on Prime in June 2007.

Synopsis

Georgia Lass is aloof and emotionally distant from her family and shied away from her life. After dropping out from college, she takes a job at Happy Time Temporary Services. On her lunch break of her first day, she is hit and killed by a toilet seat from the de-orbiting of the Mir space station.

She is informed shortly after her death that, rather than moving on to the "great beyond", she will become a grim reaper in the "external influence" division, responsible for reaping souls of people who die in accidents (many of which are of Rube Goldberg-style complexity), suicides and homicides.

Through the first season, George has trouble adjusting to her circumstances: collecting souls, while holding a day job at Happy Time. By the second season, she has mostly adjusted to her new role, though still has unresolved issues with her life and her afterlife.

George's family is struggling to deal with her death. Her mother, Joy, is depressed, and visibly repressing it, while Clancy, her father, is cheating on Joy. George's sister, Reggie, acts out — stealing toilet seats from neighbors and school, and hanging them on a tree — before being sent to therapy by Joy. She clings to the belief that George visits her, but is starting to lie to cover this up. At the start of the second season, the family began to break apart as divorce proceedings began.

Nearly all of the main characters have some form of depression, however, they cope with it in different ways: Mason resorts to alcohol and drugs, Daisy puts on a veneer of perkiness, and Roxy is physically, and verbally aggressive. Rube and George are more open about their sadness.

Cast and characters

Reapers

• Georgia "George" Lass (Ellen Muth): The show's protagonist. In addition to being a grim reaper she has a day job at Happy Time Temporary Services, under the assumed name "Millie". She is killed when a toilet seat from the Mir space station falls on her.

• Rube Sofer (Mandy Patinkin): The head of the group of reapers; becomes the father figure for George (whom he calls "Peanut") in her grim-reaping afterlife. He died in 1927 or earlier, and had a daughter named Rosie. It is hinted that he died while on the run after a robbery, though his actual manner of death is never made explicit.

• Roxy Harvey (Jasmine Guy): A strong-willed, sassy, independent character. She begins as a meter maid as her day job, but later on becomes a cop as soon as she realizes she is with the wrong job. She was killed in 1982 by a jealous roommate (strangled to death with leg warmers - which she invented).

• Daisy Adair (Laura Harris): A spoiled actress who often tells stories about (alleged) sexual escapades with classic film stars. She died on December 13, 1938 in a fire in Marietta, Georgia, supposedly on the set of Gone with the Wind. Her last thought was "Why has nobody ever loved me?"

• Mason (Callum Blue): Despite being an addict and a thief, he is a likeable fellow, and acts as an "older brother" figure to George. He says he is in love with Daisy. He is originally from London, England, and is revealed to be an atheist in episode 202. He died in 1966 by drilling a hole in his head to achieve the permanent high.

• Betty Rohmer (Rebecca Gayheart): A confident, well-adjusted reaper. She keeps Polaroids of each of the souls she reaped in department store shopping bags, organized by personality type. She is beginning to bond with George when early in the first season she "hitches a ride" with one of the souls George had reaped and is never seen again. She died in 1926 while cliff-diving.

• Charlie (Spencer Achtymichuk): Only a child, about 11-13 years old, Charlie is a different kind of reaper. He is an animal reaper (specifically household pets). He is homeless and was killed 7 years prior to his introduction by a drunk driver. He first met George when Deloris Herbig's cat Murry was sick and had to go to the vet. She introduced herself and he knew her as "Toilet Seat Girl." When Charlie later had to take the soul of a Komodo Dragon at Reggie's school, Reggie discovered that this wasn't a normal boy. She asked if he knew a girl named George, and he replied, "Was she killed by a toilet seat? Yeah, I've heard of her."

Family

• Joy Lass (Cynthia Stevenson): George's uptight mother. She likes to have order, rules, and control in her life. Other characters in the show, such as her own mother, mention that her obsession with control is how she copes with denial of her own out-of-control life, such as her daughter George's death, her younger daughter's Reggie Lass grieving with sister George's death, and her divorce.
• Clancy Lass (Greg Kean): George's father. He is an English Professor at the University of Washington. His relationship with Joy begins to seriously deteriorate after the death of George. He indulges Reggie as much as possible — possibly because this annoys Joy — and for a portion of the series, had an affair with one of his Shakespeare class students, becoming the final death knell to the marriage.
• Reggie Lass (Britt McKillip): George's younger sister. Though George ignored her while she was alive, Reggie is very much affected by the death of her sister. She believes that her ghost still roams about the city and visits their home from time to time (technicaly, she is right).

Happy Time Temporary Services

• Delores Herbig (Christine Willes): George's boss. Delores Herbig becomes the supportive, maternal figure that George never had when alive.
• Crystal Smith (Crystal Dahl): Happy Time's receptionist. A very mysterious person who seems to know more than what she barely says. She once helped the reapers organize into computer files souls' last thoughts. She steals office supplies, specifically POST-IT NOTES. Although unconfirmed due to the shows cancellation, it may be possible that Crystal herself is a grim reaper like Rube.

Episodes

Each episode lasts approximately 45 minutes and usually follows the events of just one day.

Grim reapers

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Grim reapers wear no traditional black cloak and and carry no scythes, but their role remains traditional: they remove the souls of the living shortly before death and escort them into their afterlife.

Death has a list of who is scheduled to die and when. The foreman periodically receives an extract of the upcoming events on the list, transcribes certain information to a yellow Post-it note. He then passes out the post-its to the reapers; this assignment is non-transferable — only that reaper can remove that soul. That person must be reaped at the time of their intended death, or the soul will remain in the dead body until reaped.

If the events surrounding a person's death are interfered with by a reaper and they do not die at their appointed time, the soul will "wither and die and rot inside" them. Deaths can also be stopped without risk to the soul by interfering well in advance, thus reapers would not be interfering with the events that lead to the death, however such actions do have consequences which can result in many more people dying before their time. Reapers collect souls until they reach a quota, though they do not know in advance what their quota is. Once that quota is reached, the reaper moves on and the soul collected last takes his or her place. No one's quota during the show's run is revealed, but it is presumably a very large number since they take, on average, one soul a day, and Rube has been reaping for around eighty years (possibly well over 29,000 souls).

Reapers have a physical body and may interact with the living and the dead. They do not age, but reapers cannot fly, disappear or walk through walls, so they need to find their reap by conventional means of transportation. In fact, the only real power besides collecting souls is an ability to heal quickly, indeed, a complete inability to die (again), allowing a quick recovery from any physical harm incurred on the job, and as stated by George "We (reapers) can drink as much tequila as we want without waking up with a hangover.". Reapers also have the same emotional and physical needs and drives as living humans, such as eating.

To remove a soul, a reaper must touch the body of the person to be reaped. When possible, the touch is done before death to minimize emotional harm to the soul, especially in cases of violent death. After death, the soul sometimes exists for a short time as a ghost. These ghosts retain the physical image of the being as it was reaped. If reaped before death, the ghost does not show any injuries suffered during death and usually doesn't remember dying. Souls reaped after death often manifest wounds corresponding to the manner of their deaths and may be heavily traumatized by the experience.

Ghosts cannot communicate directly with the living, only with and through the undead reapers. The passage into the afterlife is shown as a brightly lit scene towards which the newly-deceased is drawn. The portal/scene is unique to each soul: for a child, it may be a wonderful carnival, but for a yoga master, it may be a Deva beckoning from within a Divine Lotus. Souls cannot be forced to enter the portals and can be downright stubborn about it if they feel it is not yet time for them to move on. A big part of the Reapers' job is to convince such souls to do so.

Reapers do not get paid, so they must find ways to get money, whether a day job, or "living off the land". Reapers often take things from their reaps, sometimes with permission from their ghosts including even, at times, houses and cars. Of the reapers featured in the show, only George and Roxy hold steady jobs, with Daisy getting occasional work as an actress.

It is important that the living do not realize that reapers are among them. This makes it taboo for reapers to enter into romantic relationships with the living; it is allowed (though frowned upon) for reapers to develop platonic friendships. It is likewise frowned upon for a reaper to gain notoriety among the living (for example, when George receives a promotion at work, she is encouraged not to accept it). Apparently, reapers are never noticed in the immediate aftermath of a death, even when arguing with their reap. Ronnie, a person suffering from schizophrenia, could apparently see reapers at work, as well as gravelings, another normally unseen creature involved in deaths (see below).

When seen by the living, a reaper's physical appearance is different from the one they had when alive, though fellow reapers see their original appearances. This remains true as long as any of the reaper's contemporaries still live (Betty and Rube have apparently regained their original appearances). George says her appearance resembles someone familiar "with crack cocaine, ten-dollar blowjobs, and maybe even a trick baby or two". On Halloween, however, reapers regain their original appearance for the day, meaning the recently deceased need to wear masks. This effect continues into All Saints' Day; George's sister, Reggie, and even Crystal apparently recognizes her on that day. Although she had been dead for 60 years, Daisy was recognised by an elderly man who remembered her.

Only George's and Mason's assumed faces have been shown on screen; the DVD commentary track for the pilot episode suggests Fuller's departure led a de-emphasis of this aspect of the reaper's back-story.

As part of the system, Reapers are forbidden to tell anyone about Grim Reapers or to reveal that they are dead people who have been returned to life. If they try, various bad things happen, including the spontaneous loss of any memory they try to use as proof that they know something only the dead person could have known. However, various psychically aware persons in the Dead Like Me universe can sense that there's something not right about Reapers, and are even sometimes dimly aware of what's happening if they see a soul reaped. Some people being reaped also seem to think something strange has happened. While some people claim to love Death and would seem to be ideal Reaper "groupies," the reaction to actually seeing a Reaper at work or suspecting what they are is usually fear, horror, and immediate flight. However, Mason meets a record store worker in the episode "Rest in Peace" who gets turned on by the fact that he is a reaper.

Pet reapers, who collect animal souls, also appear during the series, but it is unspecified how they are chosen or replaced. For that matter, it is unclear if these reapers are only for pets, rather than animals in the wild.

There are also "Plague Reapers", who are apparently left over from the Middle Ages, when the plague took many. Only being able to take plague victims, they have very little to do in the modern world. A group of them was once pointed out to George playing bocci in a park. However, that scene was deleted and the only evidence of this group of reapers remaining in the series is in the scene in which Daisy acts as a clairvoyant in order to scam the son of her recent reap. A group of cops rush in to bust her in the middle of her séance, and, while leaving the building, are thanked by Rube for coming in to help him play a trick on Daisy. The cops reply that they don't have a lot of anything else to do, being plague division.

Gravelings

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Reapers do not actually kill people. That is actually done by the gravelings which cause "coincidences" that make sure people die when they are supposed to.

Gravelings are mischievous gremlin-like creatures that cause the accidents and mishaps that kill people. They make their home in graveyards. The living cannot see them, though in one episode, a schizophrenic seems to be able to. A reaper can see them, but only "in the corner of his or her eye," and while they appear to understand human speech perfectly well, they don't communicate verbally with Reapers (although they do talk to each other in a hushed and unintelligible babble.) Reapers can apparently communicate with them to some extent (Daisy once shushed a graveling, and when the reapers stand around George's newly erected tombstone, Rube sees a pair of gravelings playing on a statue, and yells "Get outta here!" at them). George appears to be able to see them more clearly than the rest, and it has been shown that she encountered them at least twice as a child.

In "Forget Me Not", one was produced from a character's death at the hands of a Reaper, implying that they may come from either evil or rotted souls, from the un-reaped soul of a person who dies before their destined time, or from someone who is killed by a Reaper. When Rube learns that someone died without a Post-It, i.e. without a predestined time of death, he clearly knows this means something very bad is going to happen and is not surprised to learn of the creation of the graveling. In a later episode, "Always", George vanquished it by a touch similar to that used during reaping. It is unclear if any reaper can eliminate any graveling, or just this particular one because it was killed ahead of time by a reaper, or just by George because she might have a special power that we can suppose is recognizable by gravelings, as hinted in the final swimming pool scene in "The Shallow End" .

The Reapers know when people are supposed to die and can sometimes interfere. (The trick seems to be diverting them from their fate with enough margin that they don't "make their appointments". A person who makes their appointment, even if not killed, is doomed and must be reaped.) This infuriates the gravelings and they will unmercifully harass a Reaper who does this. The reapers have all been plagued by graveling vengeance during the series, although how and why the Gravelings harassed Rube and Betty was not seen during the run of the series.

Every so often, gravelings take a "day off". It is not known whether nobody dies of external causes because the gravelings are taking the day off, or if the gravelings take a day off because nobody is scheduled to die of external causes. No one is quite sure what they do during this time, but the Gravelings have been seen smoking and squabbling over candy at the Waffle Haus.

DVD releases

Direct-to-DVD film

Template:Future film

On April 18, 2007, MGM announced that they are developing several direct-to-DVD movies and sequels. Included among them is a brand new film based on Dead Like Me.

In June 2007, a casting call for the role of Daisy Adair, formerly played by ], was posted on an entertainment industry website. It noted that John Masius wrote the film and all but confirmed that Mandy Patinkin is not in the film. According to a plot synopsis for the film and a character synopsis for the role of Daisy, several details about the film are revealed:

• At least two new characters are introduced: Calvin Kane, a new head reaper, and Hudson Hart, Reggie's secret boyfriend. Calvin is described as a "slick businessman who couldn't care less about helping the newly dead"; Hudson is someone whose soul George is supposed to reap.
• Because of Hudson, George and Reggie re-connect for the first time since George's death.
• Daisy is attracted to Calvin; Calvin, in turn, helps Daisy land an understudy role in a production of After the Fall. Daisy deliberately injures the play's lead actress, taking over her role, though the subsequent stress leads her to drinking heavily, even during performances.

Ellen Muth has posted a blog entry on her MySpace page which suggests that, depending on the success of the DVD movie, the series might go back into production.

References

1. Erickson, Hal. "Dead Like Me". All Movie Guide. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |accessmonthday= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
2. Top 10 TV picks: June 19-25 from Stuff.co.nz, a Fairfax Media website
3. The front page of a newspaper depicted in the pilot episode has an article and picture under the heading "Mir's Fiery Plunge".
4. It is learned in the deleted scenes of the first season DVDs that a Reaper is placed in the division of the factor that killed them: those who died from external influences are placed in the external influences division; those who died as a result of the Plague are in the Plague division and so forth.
5. Zyber, Joshua (May 20 2004). ""Dead Like Me: The Complete First Season"". DVDFILE.com (in English). DVDFile, LLC. Retrieved 2006-10-06. The outlandish Rube Goldberg-style chain reactions that cause each victim's death are a riot. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); External link in |work= (help)CS1 maint: unrecognized language (link)
6. The cloak and scythe are worn during the opening credits.
7. The post-it notes contain the first and middle initial and last name of the person about to die, as well as place and time of death
8. ^ Pilot episode
9. "Amazon.com Dead Like Me Season 1 DVD: Product details". {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |accessmonthday= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
10. "Amazon.com Dead Like Me Season 2 DVD: Product details". {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |accessmonthday= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
11. ^ http://www.myentertainmentworld.com/mew/audition_film-tv.html
12. "MGM Announces SF DVD Slate". Sci Fi Wire. SciFi.com. 18 April, 2007. Retrieved 2007-05-17. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)

External links

• Dead Like Me at MGM
• Dead Like Me at Scifi Channel
• Dead Like Me at Showtime

Template:Dead Like Me

• Dead Like Me
• Comedy-drama television series
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• Vancouver television series
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• 2000s American television series
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