Shows You Have to Watch: Dead Like Me

If you haven't seen Dead Like Me, I'm taking this opportunity to wholeheartedly and sincerely urge you to watch it. It's two seasons, but it's two seasons of warmth, snark, breakfast, and death(?). You owe it to yourself to watch this.

Let me give you the low-down: college dropout Georgia "George" Lass (Ellen Muth) is going nowhere in life, just got a job at a temp agency, and is set to live with her parents for the foreseeable future (i.e., the rest of her life). Then, on her first day at Happy Time (temp agency), she takes a fateful lunch break and is hit by a rogue toilet seat hurtling toward Earth from a space station--but not before she has an awkward encounter with a man who is very content to stroke her arm just enough to make her uncomfortable. Now George has certainly been impacted by the toilet seat, but she is somehow outside the impact crater. As it turns out, when her arm was uncomfortably rubbed by a stranger, her soul was reaped. There's more: George is next in line to replace this man as a reaper of souls. And so, she meets the other reapers in her "department (accidental death)", is acquainted with Gravelings, the creatures who trigger accidents that cause the deaths of those she is destined to reap, and is assigned a new identity--now that George is dead, she occupies a new body, and she's homeless. And her family can't know that she's (not?) alive.

So, the stage is set. We have a brilliant cast here, including Mandy Patinkin as the mysterious, wise Rube, the ring leader of our little league soul-reaping team. Ellen Muth plays a stellar George: totally apathetic, down to the core--sounds boring, but in practice is splendid to behold. A dull, dead-inside character sounds painfully boring to watch, but George has a fascinating demeanor. It's the kind of personality that, after seeing something thought-provoking, inspires one to speculate "What would George think about that?" I love a good bitter disposition.

For me, something about this show is home. By the end of the series Der Waffle Haus was my favorite breakfast restaurant (now in direct competition with Parks & Rec's JJ's Diner). I long to sit in one of its booths, for the waitress to know my order. Maybe I'm just sentimental, but I appreciate all the warm fuzzies the show throws at you along the way: flashbacks to George's storybook childhood amid heartwarming story arcs. For a show about death, it's pretty feel-good.

The show explores many deep themes, asking big questions. Some of my favorite parts of the series are George's narrations of different themes--like time, uncertainty, and obviously death. This is, of course, coming from Bryan Fuller, the creator of Pushing Daisies (you know, the other one with the undead girl) and contributor to many darker works such as NBC's Hannibal.

Dead Like Me is a totally underrated, greatly overlooked piece of work. It is wholly entertaining, stirring, and satisfying to watch. You need to watch Dead Like Me.

Help Me Out: Was ABC's Selfie Great? Or Did it Suck?

I just can't seem to decide on this one.

ABC's Selfie definitely poised itself to be a throwaway comedy with no substance, no wit, and a dull cast. The kind of stuff a laugh track can save. But Selfie doesn't have a laugh track. No, Selfie puts itself in the fray, into direct combat with handfuls of single-camera network comedies, and it actually holds its own. It gives me good laughs in every episode. But it still gives me some pretty decent eye rolls as well.

So which is it? Was Selfie a new, inventive comedy with a refreshing perspective? Or was it a trite, overblown drag playing poorly off our society's growing attachment to social media? I'd like to look to the show's star first, to perpetuate my uncertainty. Eliza Dooley (played by the lovely Karen Gillan) is a ditzy, seemingly brainless beauty with absolutely no social skills nor any level of thoughtfulness whatsoever. In one of the starkest cases of this anomaly, she finds herself genuinely incapable of asking a coworker "How are you?". Shut up Eliza. You suck. You're not a fool. You can speak to people normally. It's as if the writers wanted to put most of Selfie's characters' at extremes: the sassy black receptionist, the cold-blooded, hard-ass businesswoman, the awkward, unhappy analyst; the problem is, these folks just aren't likable. Okay, Charmonique is likable. Joan is fun too. But we've got a character problem here. And then we have John Cho's character, Henry, who is sort of the Jim Halpert of the cast, a dose of normalcy within the throes of strangeness. Although he may be more comparable to Parks & Rec's Ben Wyatt, since he has moments of oddity himself. At any rate, there is something strange about the characters--reminiscent of NBC's Outsourced, which featured all kinds of likable characters who just didn't mesh.



That isn't to say that Eliza and Henry don't have a good TV relationship. It was entertaining, there was significant character development in each episode, and their conflicting opinions lead to some entertaining arguments (and sometimes even hi-jinks!). All I'm saying is that the show doesn't have an perfect cast.

But let's look at the way the show presents itself: lighthearted, smiley, and super chill. First off, that's totally my style. I love that. The aspect of the show that caught me totally off guard was its blatant satire of society's social integration. The show puts the viewer in Eliza's perspective, for the most part, and somehow, that works very well for it. When I'm watching the show, I'm thinking like Eliza.

So what does all this mean? To me, the series is just a delight. I wanted to hate it so badly, but it won me over. I'm not blind, though: I know the show kinda sucked every once in awhile. It was just a lot easier to like than I thought. 7/10.

Selfie was canceled by ABC on November 7th. Although it was charming, it was clearly not charming enough. What do you think? Did ABC make the right call? Did its mediocrity outweigh its charm?