DLM vs. Tru Calling – Strange Soul-Saving Mirrors
[ movies/television ][ dead like me | television | tru calling ]
[ February 27th, 2009 ]
[ by: Alvan ]
Post contains slight spoilers on Dead Like Me and Tru Calling, be warned.
With the arrival of the new Dead Like Me movie, I got inspired and got the first season boxed set (The movie wasn’t that great, sad to say that) and started watching while working. Now, remember how I talked about how Tru Calling explored the premise of the show with a nice organized pattern, starting from the typical case and slowly expanding the question and starting to question it. Well, Dead Like Me does pretty much the opposite. The first assignment George gets as a grim reaper, she puts into question, trying to save the little girl. And in the second episode she tries to see what happens if she doesn’t do anything. These are things that in Tru Calling were explored a lot later (the other question would have gotten answered on the second season had the series continued, the other sort was explored in the episode Last Good Day through Jack). Dead Like Me does the learning curve to its premise by questioning it from the very start. And (movie spoilers ahead, skip to next paragraph if you don’t want to know) in the DLM movie, we eventually get to the point where the questioning of it all ends, sort of. As George gets promoted to a middle-management job previously held by Rube (at least that’s the way I read the ending) and will have to stand as an example to the other reapers from now on, thinking the one thing she could when the post-it notes rain from the sky: “I am so fucked”
If we’re honest, the core of Tru Calling is exploring the Calling mythos. Tru, her mother, Jack, Tru’s father, their place in the grand universal scheme of what it is all about. It approaches the system from the outside, giving the characters new puzzles and angles to solve and when you thing you have it all figured out, it throws you a curve ball. And the episodes are about the save. Each episode is really about these outside characters we catch only a glimpse of. The central characters’ issues are pretty much always explored through the characters in the episode who are doing the Calling.
In Dead Like Me, it’s the other way around. The people who get Reaped are very rarely hugely important. The way the reapers handle their jobs is usually a side point about the episode, something they do while dealing with their personal problems. There is no grand mythos to speak of. Sure we see what happens when a grim reaper takes a day off or who is the boss of all Gravelings or how one gets turned into such. And of course there are close calls to getting to the scene and trying to figure out what’s about to happen. But they’re only there to provide a backset to everything else that happens – How the human interactions between the undead, the living and the soon-to-be-dead work. What’s important here is the fact George’s sister is stealing toilet seats to grieve for her loss.
I’d love to see an episode of each show done in the other’s style. Seeing Tru do some menial morgue work and really struggling with the whole “Do I want to do this for the rest of my life”, not do homework and getting then Called, followed by her waltzing through the rewind day like it’s her routine and then share some heartwarmingly universal moments with Harrison and Davis. Or a grand-conspirational upper management playing their little grim reapers to their plans, and we’d discover there being another division of grim reapers that have an agenda that might be totally different from just saving souls. The saving of souls becoming tediously difficult when the reaping is done in a convention of people called “John Smith” and then realizing that the person who got saved didn’t have a soul at all. What does it all mean? WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?!
Ok, got a bit carried away there.
But the two are really a good example of how to take a high-concept idea and then steer it to totally different directions. By making a simple choice of what’s core of the show. Is it the lives of the core characters or is it the concept. Dead Like Me takes the high-concept core and uses it to paint a very vivid and real (if you can use the word when speaking of grim reapers) picture of the people it affects. I would say this makes Tru Calling a bit more easier to follow if you regularry miss episodes, but makes Dead Like Me easier to get more emotionally attached to. The fact that DLM is probably one of the wittiest shows ever written doesn’t hurt.
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Tags: dead like me, television, tru calling
February 27th, 2009 at 16:30
You should write something I could fervently disagree with.
Then again, I haven’t watched TC so my angle of agreement is only supported by one half of your post. Then again, I’d probably like TC as well so bah.
February 27th, 2009 at 16:44
Ok, how about “Spikey should focus less on work and more on blogging”? Can you disagree with that?
February 27th, 2009 at 17:20
Right now I’m in the middle of Excel Calling and Effectguy Like Me, but you know what they say about things.
February 27th, 2009 at 17:25
You mean “an apparently random activity or behavior that a given person or persons compulsively associate with specific circumstances. It may be because of a past association of the two activities. This term applies to personal traditions, some superstitions, and wider trends such as national proclivities.” (urbandictionary, on “thing”)
That doesn’t make any sense
February 27th, 2009 at 17:39
Go with the flow, not by literal analysis! Are you an animal from trees or engineer from cubicles? Time to make tough choices.
February 27th, 2009 at 17:48
Well, you’re an animal in a cubicle, so that makes me an engineer in a tree? Or maybe there are no animals or engineers. Just empty cubicles and trees. Or cubicles in trees.
February 27th, 2009 at 17:56
One day, this blog and its comments will be published in a book form and the world will never let the same mistake happen again.