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.

For those who don’t know what Tru Calling is about or don’t have the muscle strength to click on the link about, the show’s sort-of-premise is “Cute girl relives days, to prevent nice people who died and asked her for help not to die.” Funnily, that’s fact only maybe in the pilot. What makes the show very watchable in comparison to other series with clear-cut formulas is the fact that the formula is there only to be broken. It is specifically indicated in a few episodes that when things happen the “Cute girl relives days, to prevent nice people who died and asked her for help not to die” way, they happen off-screen. The main character relives days and saves people, mostly on Mondays and Thursdays. But when we get to see it on screen, there is some variation to the pattern.

It might be something small like “the guy who needs saving isn’t a good guy” or “it’s not about saving just one person” or “It’s about saving not only the person, but your own life also”. The writers are very aware of the core concept and know how it can be explored. And what they were planning doing with it was quite awesome as well. Shame it never got explored better. But in a world where even the best shows tend to get stale because they don’t have the guts to explore the show’s concept more often, Tru Calling was really a nice exception.

And yes, not to disapoint the eager, I will go on to a gaming tangent on this one as well. Puzzle games are really great at this. You are given a set of tools from the start. You start by solving the simplest possible obstacle with the one tool you’ll end up using most. And level by level you are presented with new problems you can solve using those tools. Usually the end levels need you to wrap your head around every concept you’ve learned and possibly understand how certain basic rules you thought existed in the beginning are broken. It’s a shame that games outside the puzzle genre rarely use this to their advantage. Or it might be so that once you include that pattern to your game, the game gets classed as a Puzzle game. Portal being a good example of the latter.

Would be interesting to see this pattern expand to other games. In MMOs, this can be seen when people do things like “Let’s try to complete this instance with sub-optimal group setup” and in some games, people are giving themselves restrictions on what they can do so they have challenges. Typical way games seem to raise the bar these days is just increase number of enemies or make you smash things with bigger reaction times. But very rarely you end up with a situation where you find yourself constantly exploring the awesome things you actually can do with the resources you could have used from the beginning.