In lieu of the absence of Hannibal, I have grasped at Bryan Fuller's other, less successful shows. Dead Like Me was created by Bryan Fuller, but he only wrote the pilot episode and essentially had no input on the show past the pilot. After having watched the first season, I can't help but wonder what a Fuller-led Dead Like Me would look like, because this first season is kind of a missed opportunity.
Dead Like Me has an interesting premise - a young 18-year-old girl dies and becomes a grim reaper. Thus, the show follows a girl (and the other grim reapers) sending people off to their deaths every day. The show sometimes approaches greatness, but overall it's extremely mediocre and a lot of times, boring. What's disappointing is that the pilot is so good that it's somewhat easy to imagine a much better show being born if Fuller were involved.
This may sound unfair, but it struck me as peculiar that Dead Like Me aired on Showtime, and yet all of its episodes - with the exception of the pilot - were around 42 minutes long. While an interesting premise, I'm not totally sure there's enough material to make it an hourlong show. Hell, most episodes seemed stretched just to reach the 42 minute mark.
After Dead Like Me's pilot, the writers decided to spend the next few episodes with George Lass trying to cheat death. I guess it's understandable that a person will struggle with in some way causing a person's death (at least in their mind.) But it got pretty annoying that the only conflict in the show was the cause of the main character resisting something she couldn't resist.
And that's where my problems with George Lass end as nearly all of her storylines more or less work well. Helping matters is that Lass is both well-written and well-acted by Ellen Muth. Lass is an underachieving, asocial college-dropout. Muth plays her both as shy and sarcastic. It's surprising that Muth successfully holds down a series lead, but I guess that's what happens when the writers have a good grasp of your character.
Also a highlight is unsurprisingly Mandy Patinkin, who takes a character who we really don't find out much about and makes him the second most compelling character on the show by sheer force of his laid-back performance. In fact, the reaper side of the show was not my problem. I liked all the reapers, even if all of them were pretty one-note.
This is going to sound contradictory, but while I enjoyed the reaper portions, the show made very little effort to flesh out any of them. That's a little harsh. They had somewhat of a backstory to Roxy, a backstory I have nearly completely forgotten about it made so little of an impression. They don't really do much with Mason either, who's mostly comedic relief and the character himself seems to realize he's a joke.
Daisy Adair on the other hand is somehow the most one-note of them all and yet thanks to Laura Harris' performance, the most sympathetic. She's stuck up, 1930s movie actress who is always bragging about herself and putting down others. But Harris plays her like her whole shtick is a facade, that she's hiding something. The best thing that could have happened to this show was replacing Rebecca Greyheart with Laura Harris.
Another sign that the writers didn't really have 42 minutes of material is that they spent an inordinately large amount of time on two less successful locales: the Lass family and Happy Time. Both undoubtedly had their moments, but too much of it was either repetitive or wasting time. I could see what the show was going for: a pseudo Office Space and a family who needs to deal with the untimely death of their young daughter/sister.
Part of the problem is that I'm not a fan of the performance of Christine Willes, who plays Delores Herbig. The overly cheery because she's hiding how sad her life is seems to be what they were going for, but she just comes off as annoying. She's a one-off character, not a regular to a series. I wasn't sure if they were trying to make the character funny or sympathetic, but I didn't really find her to be either.
The Lass family was slightly better with moments that really hit you. The deteriorating marriage is probably the most affecting and well done. The comparison between the family trip when George was little and the present-day one now that she's gone is so well done it's hard to watch. I wish the show was able to do that more often, because the troublemaking daughter was never that interesting. The acting's fine with the family, it's just that their story seems so disconnected from what I actually want to watch, it's disconcerting.
Promisingly, the season's best episodes are in the back half. I didn't really like how the twelfth freaking episode of the entire series featured like 15 minutes of things I've already seen. It was frustrating because the actual meat of the story was well-written - I was just annoyed I was getting a clip show, but I can't deny it was a better episode than most of the season. But just as I was souring on the show, the second half raised my hopes that the second season will be better.
For some reason, I just have a good feeling about the second season. I don't know how they'll be able to make the Lass family and Happy Time aspects of the show interesting, but if they do, I'm looking at a vastly superior show. Dead Like Me was mediocre, but it wasn't like most mediocre shows - it showed flashes of brilliance. Combined with a premise dissimilar to most anything else on television and good performances across the board, it's still a piece of television worth watching.
Grade - B-
Playlist
1. "Love This" - Cosmo Jarvis
2. "Lisboa" - Mount Washington
3. "Sparklers" - Gemini Club
4. "Artsy" - Living Legends feat. The Grouch
5. "All Night" - Icona Pop
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