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Last night, to celebrate the first anniversary of our business, Julie and I went to C (Flasherama ahead), a fancy seafood restaurant down on False Creek. We happened to be seated beside Ellen Muth, the lead in Dead Like Me, a TV show on Showtime. This reminded me that I had wanted to mention this and another show as two decent new additions to the 2003-04 season. In truth, I’ve only seen a couple of episodes of each, but they looked very promising.

In the first episode of Dead Like Me, Muth’s character gets killed by the meteoric toilet seat of the Mir space station as it burns up in atmosphere. Instead of going to Heaven, she joins a rogue’s gallery of grim repears, whose job it is to collect souls. Unfortunately, they’re not reimbursed for this work, so they also have to make their way in the world. I assume that this is mitigated somewhat by the fact that they can’t die again. The cast is strong, and includes the excellent Mandy Patinkin, who most famously played Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride. The show, predictably, is shot in Vancouver.

Wonderfalls is a promising mid-season replacement about an over-educated, under-employed young woman who works at a tourist tat shop at Niagara Falls. One day, inanimate objects in her store start talking to her and telling her to do things. Hilarity, as you might imagine, ensues.

Both shows are offbeat dramas, styled after Six Feet Under and Carnivale. I do wonder how the shows’ producers plan to extend these premises to multi-year runs, but that’s part of the fun.

Incidentally, the official Dead Like Me site can be found here. Showtime sees fit to restrict its site to the US, which is why I linked to the fan site. Besides, fan sites are inevitably more informative and entertaining.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 5th, 2004 at 8:49 am and is filed under Media. Tag Testing Project: No Tags. Photo by . You can skip to the end and leave a response, or trackback from your own site. If you don't see your comment within a day or so, drop me an email. Sometimes my comment spam filter gets overly zealous.