[Since I did not have time to compose the essay I wanted this month, I here present the first of two short entries from an earlier blog of mine. Although these posts were first written about 10 years ago or so, I think what they say is still relevant, perhaps more than ever.]
William Butler Yeats, in his poem "The Second Coming," said "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity"; so it seems ever to be. As a fan of such great dramatists as Shaw and Shakespeare (not in that order), I want to believe that great drama can still be written, and that such great drama can be found not just on the stage, but on the screens, both big and small. However, Yeats' words remind me that it is the way of the world for things to fall apart, and I am continually disappointed to find an inverse proportion prevailing between the brilliance of a television show, and the length of time it remains on the air. This post is the first of two dedicated to remembering some of those brilliant shows that, by the logic of capitalism, were driven to their death by the silence of the majority (one recalls the sage question of Robert Heinlein's character Lazarus Long: has there ever been a time when the majority was right?)
We begin with Dead Like Me (2003-2005), in which a group of deceased souls find themselves drafted into the ranks of the "Grim Reapers," those who are tasked with remaining amidst this mortal coil to help other souls move on from it (the premise is so original it is nearly impossible to succinctly summarize). The show lasted only two brief seasons, with a subsequent straight-to-DVD film of questionable value, but it outshone the majority of shows that go on one season after another. Whereas most shows give us a rehashing of the same stock characters and stock situations, this show gave us original characters with real personality. There was Georgia "George" Lass, the 18-year-old who was too smart not to see through the foolishness of most of what passes for "normal" in our world of computers and cubicles. There was Mason, the drug-addled Brit who was nevertheless ultimately good and chivalrous of heart. Roxy the no-nonsense meter maid-turned-cop played off of Daisy Adair, whose shallow self-involvement masked her inability to trust in a world where no one had ever loved her. Rube, their leader, played brilliantly by Mandy Patinkin (his absence from the 2009 film was its greatest flaw), was paternal in a complex way rarely seen in television.
If the characters themselves were not fascinating enough, the show's continual meditation on life, death, fate and meaning put to shame the shallow things that pass for drama today. Who can forget Rube's warning George in the first episode that if she did not take a certain little girl's soul (and only she could do it, for "death is non-transferable"), it would rot inside of her? What about what happened in the second season when someone was killed who was not scheduled to die? Even without the fantastical element of grim reaping, George's attempts to make something meaningful out of her time spent working at a temp agency (a quest also found in the brilliant novel Apathy and Other Small Victories) reminds me of the protagonists of Samuel Beckett's works, like Waiting for Godot.
Perhaps there was only so much that could have been done with this story, but I cannot believe that everything that could have been done was done in just two seasons. Dead Like Me, R.I.P.
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