Dead Like Me

This is on Showtime, and it’s killing me that the new season is starting in a few weeks and we don’t get it. The first season is on 4 DVDs: the 75-minute pilot on the first one, and about a dozen 45-minute episodes on the others. George (Georgia) Lass is an 18-year-old girl who is killed by a re-entering toilet seat from the Mir space station. This is only the first of the unlikely ways to die in this show. She finds she’s become one of the undead, whose job it is to take the souls out of people just before they die. They meet every morning in a waffle house where Rube (Mandy Patinkin) gives them post-it notes with an initial and a last name, an address, and an ETD (Estimated Time of Death). Turns out being dead is just another job, and a lousy one at that: you don’t get paid, you have to loot corpses and live in dead peoples’ apartments, and you probably need a day job. You can’t be killed again, but you sure can be hurt. This series mixes very black humor with real feeling. You have to laugh, death is inevitable for all of us, but the tragedy of it is not ignored, particularly the horror of still being around to see the effect your death has on your own family. I haven’t begun to tell you how much fun this thing is. A must see. So must see that we switched to Showtime just in time for the new season.