Oh, how I wanted to hate everything on the CW fall line-up. It didn’t seem like it would be so difficult. After hosing both Veronica Mars and her fans, their offerings seemed like more of the same pitiful attempts they gave us their freshman year: mediocre teensploitation geared towards the WB audience they lost and probably no longer exists. But the shows aren’t actually that bad. Reaper might be one of the strongest series premiering on network TV this year… and not just because excessive soundtrack reliance on Blue Oyster Cult (more cowbell!) is almost guaranteed.
Reaper tells the story of a young layabout (Sam) who wakes up on his 21st birthday to find that his parents sold his soul to the devil before he was even born, and the devil has come to collect. It sounds pretty evil, but the writers do a good job of making the parents lovable despite their snafu – which is why we understand when Sam (Bret Harrison) starts working as a reaper for the devil (Ray Wise) to pay his parents’ debt.
Taking a new spin on the idea of reaping, Sam doesn’t have to harvest fresh souls and see them to the afterlife à la Dead Like Me. Instead, he is charged with finding the evil, slippery folks who’ve escaped from hell and conveniently settled in his small town. He captures the souls, much like the Ghostbusters did, in supernaturally altered household items (in the pilot, it’s a dust buster) and brings them to the devil’s liaison on earth – a demonic DMV employee played by the forever pitch-perfect Christine Willes (Dolores Herbig of Dead Like Me).
Despite a heavy reliance on supernatural themes, at its core, Reaper is just a comedy about charming slackers. It could prove difficult for future episodes to live up to the directorial skill of pilot-helmsman and slacker-king Kevin Smith, but the ensemble cast gels in a way that could easily withstand occasionally mediocre contributors. Unfortunately, some of that cast (and the original pilot with them) won’t make it to September. Actress (and ‘World’s Youngest Screenwriter’) Nikki Reed was replaced by former Heroes cast member Missy Peregrym as Sam’s coworker and romantic lead.
Just as it took that little dove two trips to offer Noah proof that there was land out there somewhere, it’s taken The CW two seasons to find even the smallest vestige of hope that they might be a capable network. Reaper is the olive branch, and though their days on that stinky boat are far from over, there may be a future for The CW after all.
Here endeth the blog
what is the name of the song sam was listining to in his car when he first met his new boss