Since the announcement of the Dead Like Me DVD movie, my heart beats in disharmony. Half of it is grateful for any bit of the show it treasures so dearly, half of it waxes nostalgic for the original and fears change (no Rube, new Daisy, hot Reggie, etc…), but we all know how quickly reservations dissolve at the hint of a good trailer. Such a trailer has officially arrived. Set to Thomas Newman’s perfectly eerie score to Lemony Snicket, our first taste of new Dead Like Me looks darker and drier as ever – with an apparent Reggie-George reunion. That would go against yesterday’s assertions about Pushing Daisies, but this project is so far detached from Bryan Fuller, it remains his only in premise.

Quality is never a guarantee. The following is still a big step in the right direction:

This may be too many hypotheticals for one to arrive at a remotely realistic assumption, but are the stars aligning to bring back my all-time favorite prematurely canceled show? Back in April news broke that MGM was resurrecting Dead Like Me for a direct-to-DVD film. Word on cast, story and continuity, however, was non-existent. Then the darling, and apparently not that busy, Ellen Muth posted a juicy update on her MySpace blog: if this new film is successful, it could bring back the series.

I recall that same talk going around for Firefly before Serenity came out, but a paltry $25 million domestic gross put the über-kibosh on that. Let’s put a hold on the wishful thinking and take a moment to be thankful that we at least know the show’s star is returning and the premise hasn’t been entirely retooled. The film will take place two years after the end of the second season, and a “new concept” will emerge.

No idea what that would entail, but I’m more concerned with the lack of Mandy Patinkin. He may be the world’s creepiest singer, but he was also my favorite part of the show. Mysterious, heart-broken but ever-fatherly, he was the most detached of DLM’s lost souls. He’d been a melancholic 20-something for centuries and had no sign of figuring it out anytime soon, so I don’t see how they’d explain him being beamed to upper management. Well, that was last week. Now he appears to be on the outs with his wildly popular show I’d never watch, Criminal Minds.

Might this opening in his schedule allow him to be a part of the film? I sure hope so. No word on the other cast members, but it’s not looking good for Laura Harris. Callum Blue is on The Tudors (which will see a second season), but he’s not on it enough to prevent him from doing anything else. All Jasmine Guy really has to do to keep her busy is promote the release of A Different World DVDs, so I’m sure she’s on board. As for Georgia’s still-living family, I wonder if they even want to include them in the new story. Really, there’s conflicting news about everyone’s involvement, but I’m not about to cite IMDB message boards, so let’s just hold out for the official word. Though I would like to bring up one question that nobody seems to be asking: what about Kiffany?

A long time ago, there was a little program that saved my relationship with the tube. In the wake of the most devastating blow of my tv-watching career, came this low-budget cable dramedy, with an uninspired premise and a rag-tag cast of 90s refugees. It appeared to be just the latest in a long line of shows to try and capitalize on the commercial and critical obsession with mortality that had peaked about a year earlier.

But Dead Like Me was so much more. It perfectly captured the melancholy that comes from biding your time, uncertainty and the gap between youth and adulthood. Grim reapers as cosmic temps may have been a heavy-handed metaphor, but it worked. The frequency of absurd deaths allowed for a dark humor that made the frustrations of the protagonists more stirring than desperate, and each episode balanced the line between poignancy and hysterics flawlessly. Unfortunately our time in the sun with Dead Like Me was short-lived. After only 29 episodes, Showtime canceled the show, and as has been the case with so many others before and since, we were left with a disappointing finale and too many loose ends.

Naturally, this week’s news of its reincarnation initially prompted more excitement than anything, but the vagueness of this announcement compounded with the most unusual timing poses more questions than I care to think about. There has been no information on whether or not the cast will return or whether the story will be a retelling or a continuation – only that it will be told in a direct to DVD film and a director and writer have already been slated. Given all the time that’s elapsed, and the other projects that are being pursued by some of the cast-members, I don’t have the highest hopes. But stranger things have happened.

If Dead Like Me does get the treatment it deserves, with the bulk of the original cast and a chance to finish the story, it would serve as another example of how shows with loyal enough fan bases (however small) are more frequently being resurrected in different incarnations. If they go a different route, in the grand tradition of straight to video, and just try to bleed a little extra cash from an unrecognizable stone, I imagine I’ll keep it in my Netflix queue for a couple of months until I grow tired of pushing it back down whenever there’s a threat of really having to watch it.