'Dead Like Me' bizarre, funny series about Grim Reapers.

For an 18-year-old slacker, death becomes a wake-up call.

Showtime's kooky, irreverent, darkly funny new drama, "Dead Like Me" (9 p.m. Fridays with repeats), is sort of "My So-Called Death."

Like the famous ABC show about a whiny teen and her smartly grudging observations of life, "Dead Like Me" follows a newly dead 18-year-old slacker named George -- actually Georgia (Ellen Muth) -- who is just as bored with death as she was with life.

Trouble is, nobody among the undead around her cares.

At least in life, her long-suffering parents -- particularly her mom (Cynthia Stevenson) -- had to listen to her and would rise to the occasion and get mad.

Here, in limbo (or wherever), poor George is ignored or, worse, ridiculed as "toilet girl" because she was killed by the toilet seat of a falling spacecraft.

The biggest shock is not that she's dead but that she doesn't go to heaven or hell yet because of unresolved issues.

Meanwhile, she becomes the newest Grim Reaper -- and the lowest on the totem pole, assigned to collect the souls of people who are about to die in messy or violent fashion.

None of that easy passing-away-in-their-sleep stuff. No, she gets suicides, accident and murder victims.

Her boss, Rube (Mandy Patinkin), explains that when she collects enough souls, she'll be sent on her way -- which way, nobody knows yet.

And how many souls? Nobody knows that either.

There are other rude awakenings. Grim Reapers aren't ghosts. They can't walk through walls and live on air. They may be dead but they have physical bodies they must take care of.

That means moonlighting to pay for rent or scavenging in apartments of the newly dead.

Every morning over breakfast in a German waffle house, Rube gives George and the other Grim Reapers under his charge (simpy Southern belle Rebecca Gayheart, tough meter maid Jasmine Guy, snotty British punker CallumBlue) their assignments on Post-Its with a terse name, time and place.

Otherwise, they are on their own to figure out who the dearly departed is going to be and how they are going to die.

"Sort of like 'Clue'," George smarts off. "Professor Plum in the library with a rope."

But, she discovers, it's more like bank robber on a marble floor with a banana peel or, heartbreakingly, a little girl in a runaway train car over an embankment.

George discovers she has a responsibility to the dead to keep them from trauma and pain. She also has a responsibility to the universe to keep things running.

Suddenly, she discovers a purpose in death that she couldn't find in life. Ironically, death is her wake-up call.

And that's what makes this series so compelling. George is our window to the afterlife and a sounding board for beliefs.

"Dead Like Me" is the most original and intriguing new show since "Six Feet Under." Not for everyone, obviously, but it's provocative, shockingly funny and often quite telling.