I’ve been enjoying season one of Dead Like Me, although I’m not entirely sure why. It feels a little like a Joss Whedon knock-off, but has strong enough characters to keep me interested. The premise is terrible and like just about every show about the supernatural it feels like the writers are just tweaking the rules as they go– this cheapens everything a little. In case you’ve never heard of it the premise for Dead Like Me is that occasionally when someone dies instead of passing over to the other side they are sometimes selected to become a reaper (as in grim). It appears that the job of a reaper is to pull the soul out of a person’s body, and that’s pretty much it. As a courtesy, most reapers will "pop" the soul just before death, but exactly what happens if they don’t is one of those things that is rather poorly defined. Then there’s the badly handled issue of why people have to be allowed to die in the first place (since the reapers know in advance that a death will occur, they often have the means to prevent it). This is explained away early on with the assertion that a soul will "rot" if death is cheated, because, er… some reason… and then later the explanation appears to be that a balance will be upset and lots of other people will die to compensate (when they otherwise were not going to). Unfortunately both of these explanations suck balls and undermine what is otherwise a very entertaining show.

And don’t get me started on those stupid gravelings…

PS: Thanks to suggestions by RichardN, I’ve been enjoying listening to The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe recently, and have just started on Logically Critical. If you like listening to trash-talking atheists and skeptics, then these are the podcasts for you :)