DVD Watch

Dead Like Me: The Complete First Season

"Life sucks, and then you die. And then it still sucks." And therein lies the big joke of Showtime's regrettably canceled Dead Like Me; as undead protagonist George "Peanut" Lass puts it, what sort of universe would bestow one the awesome power to remove men's souls, yet still force them to work a suckass, dead-end day job? This and other questions, including what happens when the undead are derelict in their duties, attempt to mend their mourning families, or find coke-stuffed condoms rupturing in their rectums (they can't die, you know) are posed over the sprawling 4-disc set comprising DLM's first season. On a sunny day, intelligent teen underachiever George (Ellen Muth) is roused from slackerdom by her overly concerned, domineering mother, Joy (Happiness' Cynthia Stevenson), and summarily sent to the Happy Time temp agency. On her 25-minute lunch hour, a hurtling hunk of the decommissioned MIR space station roasts Peanut; fortunately, thanks to the Reapers, her soul is removed moments before, sparing her the pain and trauma associated with that sort of thing. Her identity disguised after death, she's recruited as a Reaper, spending her nights at Der Waffle Haus, where team leader Rube (a sage, understated Mandy Patinkin) passes out assignments to George, drug-addled trepanation casualty Mason (Callum Blue), Roxanne (a deadly serious Jasmine Guy), freewheeling Betty (Rebecca Gayheart), and later, silent-screen starfucker Daisy Adair (a luminous Laura Harris). Yet by day, she's still hacking it in the fluorescent hell of Happy Time, inadvertently winning the approval of temp automaton boss Delores Herbig ("You know, like her big brown eyes!"), played with tragicomic relish by Christine Willes. With the dialogue quick and George's narration whip smart, similar to the Gilmore Girls' best, plus the "f" word and dead-baby jokes, it would be easy to devolve into overly hip cynicism. However, George's attempts to reach her saddened kid sister and the family she took for granted, plus early trouble with the job, give the show emotional grounding. A procession of deleted scenes and cast commentary enlighten this pitch-black comedy, for alas, poor series, we hardly knew ye.

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