Ned (Lee Pace) is a 29-year-old pie maker with a unique magical ability to bring back to life anyone or anything that is dead.
However, Ned and Chuck find other ways to express affection: they kiss each other while encased in body bags and while holding a sheet of plastic wrap between their lips.
Charlotte Charles (Anna Friel), usually called Chuck, is Ned's childhood neighbor and boyhood crush.
She has a wealth of information on odd and uncommon topics due to reading a large variety of books while growing up in a relatively repressed environment.
Emerson Cod (Chi McBride) is the private detective who enlists the help of the pie-maker in solving murder cases.
To this end, he authors a pop-up book entitled Lil' Gumshoe designed to help her find her way home.
After several publisher rejections and sharp criticism from his mother, Emerson rewrites it and is finally accepted for publication.
He is reunited with his former lover, Lila Robinson who makes a deal with him: to help her get the police off her back or he'll never see his daughter, Penny again.
The voice also lists any measurement of time (people's ages, intervals since a particular event, or how long ago something happened) to the minute.
Lily (Swoosie Kurtz) and Vivian Charles (Ellen Greene) are Charlotte's aunts and only living family.
Charlotte was raised to believe that Lily was only her step-aunt, and that her mother was a woman named Susan who died in childbirth.
They gave up their swimming career after Lily lost sight in her right eye while cleaning a litter box and they gradually became shut-ins.
As their social phobias progressed, Charlotte stayed at home in order to take care of them, while making feeble attempts to get them to go outside.
Her ultimate goal is to inspire Lily and Vivian to overcome their social phobias and restart their synchronized swimming careers.
Lily and Vivian become close friends with Olive Snook, who delivers the pies to their Coeur d'Coeur address, which is outside the regular delivery zone.
Their personalities also significantly contrast, with Vivian being the hopeful, albeit naive sister, while Lily is the perpetual pessimist and is more confrontational.
Olive becomes particularly close to Emerson over the course of several adventures, who is fond of her energetic personality and shares her feelings of being an outsider when around Ned and Chuck.
Nine-year-old Olive is played by Samantha Bailey in "Bad Habits" and Ellery Sprayberry in "Window Dressed to Kill."
Kristin Chenoweth won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for her role as Olive Snook.
The fact that Digby is still alive and well twenty years later would seem to suggest that the resurrection suspends the aging process, but this has yet to be confirmed (however, there may be a slight possibility that any corpse revived by Ned will continue to live so long as he does not touch them again).
The Coroner (Sy Richardson) works at the City Morgue where Ned, Emerson, and Chuck inspect (and secretly interrogate) dead bodies.
Series creator Bryan Fuller planned a slow reveal of the coroner's homosexuality and his crush on Emerson Cod (Chi McBride).
[2] Alfredo Aldarisio (Raúl Esparza) is a homeopathic remedies salesman who has a fear that Earth's atmosphere could be sucked away from space and treats himself with his own herbal wares.
In "Corpsicle", Chuck gave him a sample of her hair so that he could continue his investigation into her scent, but he returned it to her without testing it in an effort to gain her trust.
During the investigation- which was complicated as the victim mentioned he was killed by his wife in his last minute 'alive' before revealing that he was a polygamist- she and Emerson became romantically interested in one another, but nothing became of it.
It is later revealed that Dwight's intentions are much more sinister than simply a visit, as he is seen brandishing a gun outside of Maurice and Ralston's house.
He is also implied to be the masked man who saves Ned and Olive's lives in the same episode, as well as having set up a faked chain of evidence so that a group of Norwegian detectives would believe that Dwight Dixon had died of natural causes rather than draw attention to his demise as a result of Ned's gift, suggesting that he is aware of his son's ability.
Other recurring roles include Eugene Mulchandani and Ingmar, who are classmates of Ned in the boarding school, are seen in flashbacks at the beginning of every episode.
Other minor recurring roles are the unnamed delivery boy and the news anchor, played by Leyna Nguyen.