Dead Like Me is an American comedy-drama television series starring Ellen Muth and Mandy Patinkin as grim reapers who reside and work in Seattle, Washington.

Filmed in Vancouver, British Columbia, the show was created by Bryan Fuller for the Showtime cable network, where it ran for two seasons (2003–04).

George soon learns that a reaper's job is to remove the souls of people, preferably just before they die, and escort them until they move on into their afterlife.

George's death leaves behind her mother (Cynthia Stevenson) and the rest of her family at a point when her relationships with them were on shaky ground.

During her lunch break on her first day, she is hit and killed by a toilet seat falling from the deorbiting Mir space station.

[3] She is soon informed that, rather than moving on to the "great beyond", she will become a grim reaper in the External Influence Division,[4] collecting souls of people who die in accidents (many of which have a Rube Goldberg-style complexity[5]), and homicides.

Her sister, Reggie (Britt McKillip), acts out – stealing toilet seats from neighbors and school and hanging them on a tree – until her mother sends her to therapy.

All of the main characters have issues with their life after death, but they cope with it in different ways: Mason (Callum Blue) resorts to alcohol and drugs; Daisy (Laura Harris) puts on a veneer of perkiness; and Roxy (Jasmine Guy) is physically and verbally aggressive.

Bryan Fuller left early in the first season because of conflicts with MGM Television, including disagreement over major script and storyline cuts considered important to the main theme.

In the world of Dead Like Me, grim reapers do not wear black cloaks or carry scythes (cloaks and scythes are only featured during the opening credits, for humorous effect), but their role remains traditional: they remove the souls of the living shortly before death and escort them into their afterlife.

[11] Completing that assignment is often difficult for the reapers, who receive only the first (and sometimes middle) initial and last name of the person about to die, the location, and estimated time of death (ETD).

Besides collecting souls, reapers have powers to remain ageless, heal extremely quickly (George once severed her middle finger, but was able to reattach it by just putting it back in place, while Mason has sustained what should have been fatal damage on multiple occasions, such as being shot and hit by a car), drink alcohol without suffering a hangover (see "Gravelings"), and forcibly pull a soul from a living body and put it back (as seen done by Roxy in Episode 9 "Sunday Mornings").

[16] Laura Boddington portrays lead character George's undead appearance in the TV series, with Jennifer Rae Westley playing her in the later film.

The portal is unique to each soul: for a child, it may be a wonderful carnival, but for a yoga master, it may be a Deva beckoning from within a Divine Lotus.

[18] Gravelings are mischievous gremlin-like creatures that cause the accidents and mishaps (in the form of Rube Goldberg machine scenarios) that kill people.

Although gravelings seem to be self-aware and recognize the reapers, they do not communicate verbally with them, and talk to each other in a hushed and unintelligible babble; other times they growl or hiss.

Rube does not appear (he reportedly had moved on), but is mentioned by the characters; the new leader of the reapers is Cameron Kane, played by Henry Ian Cusick.

The website's critical consensus reads, "Dead Like Me is a required [sic] (after)taste, but the series' acidic wit and wry observations about the simple pleasures of life and death overcome the deficit in likable characters.