kartooner

It just so hap­pens that the major­ity of tele­vi­sion shows that I hap­pen to embrace are typ­i­cally well– writ­ten, witty and intelligent.

You can say that most of what’s on TV rarely includes one of these attrib­utes let alone all three of them. What we have today, aside from the newly charted dra­mas, are the same old life­less, unfunny sit­coms and real­ity shows.

While dra­matic shows like Lost and the recent NBC hit Heroes have effec­tively cap­tured the 1950’s seri­al­ized for­mat (“Stay tuned next time to see what hap­pens…”), they, like the the old ser­ial dra­mas that they mimic are hard to fol­low if you don’t stay com­mit­ted week to week.

Therein lies a crit­i­cal flaw in this kind of seri­al­ized for­mat, that the episodes them­selves are rarely self con­tained so you bet­ter make sure Tivo is in sync and you’re pay­ing atten­tion. Yet, that’s also the fun of it all because it really is about what lurks behind the cor­ner, the twists, turns and char­ac­ter clashing.

One of the great things about the Sci-Fi chan­nel — and The Car­toon Net­work — is that they breathe life into shows that have long since been can­celed, although I’m still wait­ing on a Brisco County marathon, even if it finally got it’s own DVD set.

One such show, Dead Like Me had an inter­est­ing premise — before Show­time axed it pre­ma­turely — that didn’t fol­low con­ven­tional tele­vi­sion plot lines. Rather it focused on a group of Grim Reapers (yes, of the cloak and scythe vari­ety) that were assigned a new vic­tim each week, via a scrawled upon post-it note. The inter­est­ing aspect is that each of these indi­vid­u­als are unique in their own way and they each share a dif­fer­ent point in time that they orig­i­nally occupied.

There’s a star­let from Gone with the Wind (on-set mishap), a rugged cop played by A Dif­fer­ent World’s Jas­mine and a smarmy, witty and yet sym­pa­thetic Eng­lish chap, and that’s just to name a few. Each in the group looks as they once did when they were alive to one another, but to the out­side world they look dif­fer­ent in appear­ance so as to not spook the living.

Their boss, the “Head Grim”, is played by Mandy Patinkin (Inigo Mon­toya from the Princess Bride) and he basi­cally noti­fies them of whom to reap while pass­ing out post-it’s in their offi­cial meet­ing place, a reg­u­lar Mom and Pop café. How­ever, they do not take the life of their vic­tim, no, that grue­some task is del­e­gated to these crea­tures — which look like a cross between a Grem­lin and a por­cu­pine — called “gravelings”.

While it all sounds a bit off kil­ter it makes way for bril­liant writ­ing and char­ac­ter devel­op­ment, even if the sub­ject mat­ter is a bit on the “grim” side. It’s just unfor­tu­nate that Showtime’s exec­u­tives gave it the boot before it could really flour­ish as an orig­i­nal series that could have stood on its own.

If you’re inter­ested in check­ing out some­thing new (or old, depend­ing on how you look at it), I’d rec­om­mend watch­ing the pilot, snatch­ing the set from Net­flix or Best Buy, or tun­ing in to the Sci-Fi net­work to catch the series before it’s 2-season offer­ing wears thin.