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.
[...] 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 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. [...]