Dead Like Me-Season 2 (2003) |
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Dead Like Me-Season 2 (2003) |
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| BUY IT |
| General | Extras | ||
| Category | TV Series |
Deleted Scenes Featurette-"Dead Like Me... Again" featurette Featurette-"Putting Life Into Death" featurette Gallery-Photo |
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| Rating |
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| Year Of Production | 2003 | ||
| Running Time | 670:45 | ||
| RSDL / Flipper |
Dual Layered Multi Disc Set (4) |
Cast & Crew | |
| Start Up | Ads Then Menu | ||
| Region Coding | 4 | Directed By |
David Grossman Peter Lauer Robert Duncan McNeill Kevin Dowling |
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Studio
Distributor |
 Twentieth Century Fox |
Starring | None Given |
| Case | ? | ||
| RPI | $49.95 | Music |
Stewart Copeland Emilio Kauderer Tom Maxwell |
| Video | Audio | ||
| Pan & Scan/Full Frame | None |
English Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s) Spanish Dolby Digital 2.0 (128Kb/s) French Dolby Digital 2.0 (128Kb/s) Italian Dolby Digital 2.0 (128Kb/s) |
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| Widescreen Aspect Ratio | 1.78:1 | ||
| 16x9 Enhancement |
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| Video Format | 576i (PAL) | ||
| Original Aspect Ratio | 1.78:1 | Miscellaneous | |
| Jacket Pictures | No | ||
| Subtitles |
English for the Hearing Impaired French French for the Hearing Impaired Spanish Spanish for the Hearing Impaired Italian Italian for the Hearing Impaired Danish Norwegian Dutch Swedish Icelandic |
Smoking | Yes |
| Annoying Product Placement | No | ||
| Action In or After Credits | No | ||
Being undead has never been so ... acerbic. Another in a long line of great shows to get canned after only two seasons, Dead Like Me lines up there with the likes of Huff, Hex and Dark Angel – shows with strong cult followings and even a little critical acclaim that just couldn’t meet up to commercial expectations as far as advertising revenues went. Not that Dead Like Me was ever going to have the extensive run that shows like Stargate have enjoyed, but at two seasons it does feel a little short-changed.
I am not sure if this ever got a run on FTA TV in Australia, but I certainly never saw it. For those of you who are completely unfamiliar with this show, it follows the story of 18 year old college drop-out George Lass (Ellen Muth), who, in the pilot episode, is killed on her first day as an office temp doing menial filing work when a toilet seat fails to burn up on re-entry after falling off the MIR Space Platform and lands squarely on her on her way back from her 35 minute “lunch hour”. After death, George finds that she is to continue serving on Earth as an undead grim reaper, which involves ferrying the souls of the dead to their resting place. For a girl whose sole ambition in life was to do nothing, and who has never had to fend for herself, George finds that being undead is a lot more difficult than it was being alive or to just be plain dead.
George works in the division of the grim reapers that deal with death by external influence – this means predominantly accident, murder, and suicide. She is joined in this division by:
The first season of Dead Like Me set the groundwork by clearly establishing the rules for the dead (and the undead) and setting out the business of grim reaping, as well as George learning to cope with being undead so young and the troubles this entails for her and her family. The second season deals more with George coming to terms with her own undeath, and how her death has impacted on her family, while fleshing out the other characters and their personal problems, even in undeath. All 15 episodes of the second episode are spread across these 4 discs. A full run down of each episode is likely to just ruin things for you, but you can get complete summaries at TV.com amongst other places:
While billed as a sit-com of sorts, Dead Like Me ran on Fox’s Showtime cable channel, which enabled it the scope to include some brilliant “real-world” dialogue, coarse language and all, and in doing so get to a dramatic character depth that few shows ever reach. Don’t get me wrong, this show is not as dark, bleak, satirical or cruel as the fabulous Rescue Me, but it and Dead Like Me occupy the same plain, inasmuch as they transcend drama and comedy such as to be an almost perfect combination of both.
Dead Like Me is, however, significantly more bizarre and surreal than Rescue Me, and in doing so, manages to create its own comedic paradigm that sets it apart from its contemporaries – while the undead might be a road well-travelled, the spin that Dead Like Me puts on the theme all but redefines the genre. This bizarreness is, unfortunately, the factor that was ultimately the show’s demise (much as it was for Huff). By being truly original, truly groundbreaking, truly daring, it alienated the core audience of TV; those looking for a quick post-work fix of mindless entertainment. While cable-TV was the place where this show may have prospered, it lacked the edge of HBO shows like Deadwood and The Shield, which similarly aired on Showtime, but which played the hard-boiled crime angle to new heights and thereby played to an already established audience. Dead Like Me tried to create its own market space with an audience that just wasn’t ready for it.
While the ending here is not a neat conclusion to the whole series, it achieves a closure of sorts, and hopefully the remaining narrative threads will be dealt with in the impending TV-movie. The lack of a neat conclusion should not deter any would-be viewers, however, and if your sense of humour is as acid-tongued as mine, I would definitely suggest checking this out. 29 episodes may seem exceedingly brief, but it’s worth the time.
Presented in 1.78:1, 16x9 enhanced, this is the original aspect ratio of the series.
When scaled to 1080p, the faults start to appear in this transfer, though largely these are faults that are inherent to any SD content, and they are largely invisible on a display device any smaller than 60”. When scaled to a 720p display device, the image is extremely good and takes on a real “film like” quality.
Colour is well saturated and nicely balanced, detail is sharp and while the background is a little soft, it never dissolves into data jargon.
There are no MPEG artefacts, and no film-to-video transfer artefacts that are visible at 720p, but when you boost the image to 1080p there is some minor background macro blocking and same halo rings around text and figures in the background. Those artefacts are not too distracting, even at 100” in size.
There is some very minor dirt on the print, but you probably won't notice any unless you really go hunting for it.
Subtitles are available in the various languages set out above. I watched the English for the Hearing Impaired subtitles. They are white with a black/grey border and reasonably accurate, though sometimes do not convey the full text of what is being said.
All four discs are apparently dual-layered, but I spotted no dual layer pauses. They likely fall between episodes.
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Audio is available in English in 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround encoded at 448Kb/s, an Spanish, French and Italian in 2.0 Dolby Digital Stereo encoded at 128Kb/s. I listened to the English track and sampled the others.
While primarily a dialogue-driven soundtrack, there is a surprising amount of ambient surround information here and clear directional audio cues.
Dialogue itself is nicely rendered, with subtle vocal inflections well captured.
The music fills out the surrounds when present, but the score or additional music is never over-used. Indeed, the producers seem to be quite adept at choosing a song that will put a very bizarre, almost creepy spin on a lot of situations.
Subwoofer use is also surprisingly high, but given the number of violent deaths involved, that’s hardly surprising.
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All menus are presented in 1.78:1, 16x9 enhanced, static and silent.
Presented in 1.78:1, 16x9 enhanced, 2.0 Dolby Digital Stereo Sound, this is a promotional featurette.
Presented in 1.78:1, 16x9 enhanced, 2.0 Dolby Digital Stereo Sound, these are a series of snippets looking at the FX of the series:
NOTE: To view non-R4 releases, your equipment needs to be multi-zone compatible and usually also NTSC compatible.
I do not have an R1 copy for an exact comparison, but from what I can tell the content is the same, though we get more language and subtitle options in R4. Other than that, the difference is only in the NTSC picture format and the region coding. Buy whichever is cheapest.
Dead Like Me: Season 2 seems a bit cut short, but on the whole is a satisfying experience with many bitter laughs along the way. This is not going to suit everybody’s sense of humour, and some parents are likely to be upset that a show directed at late teens has plenty of teenage bad language. I, for one, found this hilarious and was sad to hear that this was it for the series (though the IMDB lists a made-for-TV movie that is in pre-production).
The DVD set is quite good for SD material, and a good, relatively inexpensive way to experience this show if you don’t have Foxtel.
| Video | |
| Audio | |
| Extras | |
| Plot | |
| Overall | |
| Review Equipment | |
| DVD | Sony Playstation 3 (HDMI 1.3) with Upscaling, using HDMI output |
| Display | Sony VPL-VW50 SXRD Projector with 100" Longhorn Pro-Series White Matt 16:9 screen. Calibrated with Video Essentials/Digital Video Essentials. This display device is 16x9 capable. This display device has a maximum native resolution of 1080p. |
| Audio Decoder | Built in to amplifier/receiver. Calibrated with Video Essentials/Digital Video Essentials. |
| Amplification | Sony TA-DA9000ES |
| Speakers | Jensen QX70 Centre Front, Jensen QX45 Left Front & Right Front, Jensen QX20 Left Rear & Right Rear, Jensen QX-90 Dual 10" 250 Watt Subwoofer |