The first season of "Dead Like Me" was released on DVD a couple of weeks ago, so if you don't have access to cable, now is your chance to catch up with this better than average series.
Created by Bryan Fuller, who went on to do "Wonderfalls", "Dead Like Me" has a similar dark humour and style. However, Fuller left DLM early on over differences in direction with the producers, and you can see this shift in style, with the later episodes touchy-feeling their way into "Joan of Arcadia" territory (that's not a bad thing, just not how the series started) albeit with stronger language, some gruesomely funny deaths, and a bit of the old rumpy-pumpy.
"Dead Like Me" stars Ellen Muth (best known for her role in "Dolores Claibourne") as Georgia "George" Lass, a directionless, sullen 18 year old who on her first day at work at a temp agency, while on lunch, is struck by a toilet seat from a disintegrating MIR space station. Almost before she can say "Oh, Shit!", she is dead. A fellow named Rube (Mandy Patinkin) tells her she is undead, and now a Grim Reaper, those who escort the souls of the accidentally killed to elsewhere in the afterlife. Rube hands out assignments on yellow post-it notes to his crew at Der Waffle Haus, and over the course of the 13 eps George gets to know the crew and sees how her death has affected her family.
However, this doesn't mean that the neccessities of undeadness come with. George still has to find a job and a place to live. So it's back to the Happy Time temp agency, and crashing in the apartments of dead people. And George likes working at Happy Time as much as Jaye does at Wonderfalls. The supporting cast and characters on DLM are very good, and as the season unfolds, we find out how the other Reapers in the crew came to meet their fates.
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