Screenhead

When I heard there was to be a movie version of Dead Like Me due to come out, called Dead Like Me: Life After Death, I was almost doing handsprings in my living room.  I loved that show, you see, and thought there were a whole lot of unanswered questions from its untimely demise.

It was a great show, dependent on excellent characters and their carefully posed wordplay to drive the outlandish situation, and indeed, everyone delivered.  It was a show I was positively enamored with, and the hope that the loose ends left behind would be finally cleared up was too good to believe.  And in a very real way, it WAS too good to believe.

For those of you who haven’t seen either the show or the movie yet, you’re missing out on something great.  Just to bring you up to speed, here’s the basic rundown.  Thankfully, the movie dovetails into the show nicely, so describing one will go a long way to describing the other.  Dead Like Me is the story of celestial civil servants, grim reapers.  They’ll go so far as to make fun of the conventions that reapers all wear black robes and carry scythes, which is extra funny.  Anyway, the reapers receive their assignments from “upper management”, which are then handed out to the individual reapers by their team leader, who does little actual reaping himself (or herself, depending), but rather serves as a coordinator for a reaping team.  In this case, the previous team leader of a coterie of reapers “received his lights”, a term that means that a reaper passes on into the next world to their eternal reward.  The new team leader, a shady businessman who died in the 9/11 attacks, is encouraging the reapers to break all the codes of reaper living, most notably, having minimal contact with the living.  This disdain for the rules leads our reaping team to run amok, indulging their long-repressed earthly desires with disastrous results.

For those of you who are familiar with the series, know this–the lion’s share of the cast is back.  Rube is gone, of course, as is the original Daisy, but everyone ELSE is in play, including the truly awesome Jasmine Guy.

Perhaps the best part of Dead Like Me: Life After Death is how cleanly it illustrates chaos theory, in which one small change in the natural order of things can lead to massive catastrophe later.  It’s terrific that a movie can manage to, somehow, be both cerebral and hilarious all at the same time.  When you can watch a movie and be laughing one minute and thinking the next, you know you’re in the presence of something truly special.  There will even be a few special inside references for longtime viewers, including the return of the “pet reaper”, and fun with Happy Time’s silent sentinel Crystal and dear, dotty Dolores Herbig.

But I’m not here to praise alone…there’s plenty of problem with this.  Owing primarily to an entirely too short run time, several key points are glossed over and left to become plot holes.  Worse, the movie itself watches like an overlong series episode, separated almost clearly into an A-story about the new reapers’ team leader and a far too dominant B-story featuring newest reaper George and her struggles with her sister Reggie.  The B-story, oddly, is well thought out and very fleshed out, giving it a solid feel, but the A-story is distinctly lacking, giving a strange, unbalanced feel to the proceedings.

Ah, but for fans of the series, it’s probably as good as could be had without a full-on new season–which, petitions notwithstanding, isn’t likely to happen.

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