Also on the cd from Michelle were the first two (possibly the only two) seasons of this show Dead Like Me. Herewith the relevant part of the thank you email I sent Michelle:
I'm most of the way through the first season of "Dead Like Me", which I'm finding tres amusant. It's a cute concept which I thought, having watched the pilot, might be at risk of being a bit twee and maybe sort of boring, but far from it - I like it muchly, and generally the way that about once every couple of episodes it throws in something of such remarkably (and deliberately) bad taste that I can't help but laugh (the mauling of the protester by the service station bear comes to mind). Mandy Patinkin good value too - totally dorky yet with tons of gravitas (though we far prefer him as Inigo Montoya, natch - which is why you set me up with this show, right?). Also, George kinda reminds me of you - had you picked up on that resemblance? (I bet you hadn't - or, even if you had, that you aren't admitting it.)
To fill in the blanks: the premise is set up in the pilot, in which Georgia Lass (she prefers "George"), archetypal 18 year old slacker with an attitude (though to call her an 'archetype' doesn't do justice to the depiction of her character - but it's in the ballpark), is killed by a flaming piece of debris (a toilet seat, actually) which falls from a Russian space station, whereupon she discovers that she is now undead - a 'grim reaper' whose job it is to usher the souls of the recently dead to their next destination (the show is coy about where this might actually be). There's a motley collection of others in the city (Chicago?) sharing her portfolio (which is something like 'intrusively traumatic deaths' - which in practice means dying by, eg, being crushed by a falling piano, being crushed by a falling man while you're walking down the church aisle having just been married, (grislily) fruit guillotine, and, of course, mauling by aforementioned bear for whose rights you are ironically protesting); they meet at Der Waffle Haus, where Rube, their nominal boss, hands out their assignments on yellow sticky tabs; they're visible to the living (but look different from their 'living' selves - which is how they appear to other undead) and need to find some source of income in order to get by.
It's not really a black comedy/drama, though it's amusingly morbid in its general sensibility. Sometimes the deaths take on genuine pathos (the small child who dies in the train accident at night in either the pilot or the second ep, I can't remember, the gentle schizophrenic man who falls for George and then literally falls, the pair of lovers visited by Mason) while sometimes they're played for laughs - it's never depressing (and I say this as one who does occasionally get quite seriously down about the idea; well, who doesn't?) in part because it's so irreverent and in part because of the promise of something beyond which it holds out. Apart from the sporadic outbreaks of bad taste mentioned above (Mason's strip-searching in the airport comes to mind and then the subsequent bursting of the drug-filled baggie he's smuggled in up his rectum) I also get into the out and out profanity which pops up all the time, often but by no means exclusively from George, and also George's general anti-everything attitude (no surprises there).
(40-minute episodes; tops acting; decent characterisation and some nice development (though not as much as one might hope); neat episode structures; extended story arcs; generally clever writing.)
