Dead Like Me is the darkly humorous and ironic story of Georgia Lass (or "George"), played with alternating angst and apathy by interesting newcomer Ellen Muth. George is an 18 year old slacker who pretty much sleep walks through life without much focus or direction until she is struck down by a piece of the Mir space station. And by "piece", I mean a fiery toilet seat, hurling more than 200 mph to earth. Georgia broke its fall as it landed. Prompted by her mother, Joy (played splendidly as the Bad Cop by Cynthia Stevenson), George is pretty much forced to get a job, any job. After visiting a temp agency, George is given a low level drab job by an overly sunny placement agent who was not amused by George's wiseass observations. After spending the morning ignoring her duties and ducking responsibility at her new job, George uses her 35-minute lunch hour to go outside to get food. It is then that she meets her fiery fate. Pretty funny stuff so far, right? Well actually it's all in the presentation of the actors, the wit of the writers and the vision of the directors.

Based on the concept of writer/creator Bryan Fuller, executive director John Masius (who originated the "Touched By An Angel" concept) has given this show about death more sarcasm, more biting humor and phraseology. There are intelligent explanations of afterlife issues that mystify us, like how George finds closure in losing her corporeal mortal coil by attending her own autopsy (shown from a distance), or how even though death at a young age seems grossly unfair, the persistence of a soul after its "expiration date", leads to a miserable tormented soulless person. Death restores the natural order of things.

Comparisons between this show and another cable show about death seem inevitable, but don't be fooled. The characters of "Six Feet Under" are more tortured and depressed, and while often twisted, the caustic wit of this show is free flowing and the irony is almost palpable. The jokes and humorous situations work on many different levels.

So now George is dead, or Undead, as they like to say and she finds herself involuntarily forced into another entry-level position. This time her duty is to join a team of other undead people who are Grim Reapers, a sort of civil service job where reapers take souls just before death and escort that person to their Final Destination.

Team Grim Reaper is headed by Rube (the always strong and engaging Mandy Patinkin), a gruff supervisor type, who hands out the names and ETD's (Estimated Time of Death) to George and the others on her team. These assignments are on little yellow Post It notes. Don't you love it? The most important piece of information about a person, reduced to a Post It Note. 3M must be glowing.

The other Reapers on George's team are quirky and include:

-Roxy, a crude tough talking no nonsense woman played by Jasmine Guy. Think of Roxy as the antithesis of Whitley (Jasmine's role on A Different World.)

-Mason, a drug-seeking Brit (and possible crush for George) played by Callum Blue

-Betty, a ditzy glamorous fashion template, played with relish by Rebecca Gayheart

Taking George under his wing, Rube tends to be smart, sardonic, amusing and fatherly, all at once. He needs this flexibility, because unlike the more experienced reapers, George is running through a gamut of emotions trying to adjust to her new circumstances. The reapers tend to meet and congregate in Der Waffle Haus, a Waffle House knock-off diner, complete with 1970's décor but the added "charm" of constantly piped in yodeling music. Who doesn't love a good yodeling track?

DLM doesn't just focus on George and her plight. It also focuses on the family George left behind: Joy, the dour and critical mother, Clancy (Greg Kean) the Good Cop placating father, and Regina (or "Reggie", played by Britt McKillip as Georgia's "invisible" little sister, who clearly wants to bond with George, but gets brushed aside anyway).

The show craftily uses two actresses to explain how George can live and work in the same town after her death. George and Mason are played by two different actors (Laura Boddington and Jacob Chaos, respectively) as their Undead alter egos. It's a neat camera trick, especially when George revisits her mother to see if she is missed.

Leaving a life where she avoided following rules, George now finds that being a reaper in the afterlife there are quite a few rules she must observe:

-Observe, but do not interact with the living

-Do not interfere with fate nor change the outcome of any event

-Extract the soul before he or she catastrophically buys the farm

-Check the identity of the soul before extraction, since only the first initial and last name are provided on the Post It

-Lead the souls to their Great Light Show, but do not follow them any farther than that

-Although her duties are clear, pay and housing are not provided; most reapers also have "day jobs"

So after reaping a punk rocker dude, George winds up squatting in his apartment. And you know what pigs young men living alone can be. So now, after fighting her mother about these points, George finds herself in her own apartment, responsible for keeping her own place clean and faces possibly finding a job, for real this time. I guess DLM just goes to show you, nothing snaps you out of a long stretch of malingering and irresponsibility quite like death can.



Taken From Here