Fall '07: "Reaper"
Of the various nasty things that happen to Sam Oliver — the titular Reaper of The CW’s new Tuesday night action-comedy hybrid — on his twenty-first birthday, the most disturbing might be the weird affliction that comes over his facial hair. Whenever Sam speaks to his love interest and co-worker, Andi, a wispy little mustache sprouts from his upper lip. His eyebrows, too, expand and contract, like a small, hairy set of supplemental lungs. They even change color subtly, giving one the impression that they are mood eyebrows, and Sam is becoming anxious. Or possibly relaxed.
This must be really embarrassing for Sam, though I personally think he has little reason to worry. After all, when Andi turns to walk out of the room, her hair and ass both grow by several inches.
A trick of the light? Hormonal imbalance? Nope, just a handful of re-shot scenes shoehorned into Reaper’s pilot after the original love interest was dumped. No doubt those scenes were cobbled together at the last minute and at great expense. Still, you’d think somebody involved with the production might have thought to run a razor over their lead’s mug before rolling the cameras.
That’s the problem with Reaper in a nutshell. It’s an entertaining show, but a lot of it seems like it was carelessly thrown together and not thought all the way through. It’s as if whomever wrote the treatment was also taking periodic bong hits, and midway through they just got bored and wandered off to watch MXC.
Even the show’s premise is half-baked. It seems to have germinated from the seed of a single idea: What if an aimless slacker were to wake up one day to learn that his parents had sold his soul to the devil? That’s an original, intriguing concept; but unless every episode is going to involve said slacker moaning, “I can’t believe my parents sold my soul to the devil” for forty minutes, there needs to be a little more meat on the treatment.
So to fill out their original concept, the creators came up with the slightly-less-than-original idea of having the devil set Sam to work collecting escaped souls and returning them to Hell. And while the premise of chasing down and subduing assorted ghoulies week after week was already done to near perfection two decades ago by The Thirteen Ghosts of Scooby Doo, it’s apparently still a crowd pleaser. Just take a look at The CW’s own inexplicably popular Supernatural. Surely, creepy slash fiction writers can’t be the only thing keeping that puerile, televised turd afloat.
This seems to be about as far into the development process as Reaper’s creators got before the studio interns rolled up with the wheelbarrows full of cash. But let’s you and I spend another thirty seconds to think this through, shall we?
So… why does the devil want these souls back in Hell, exactly? Isn’t sowing violence and destruction among the living kind of Satan’s thing? He’s certainly happy enough to do other typically devilish things, such as make evil Faustian bargains with desperate folks, and run drunk guys over with zambonis. You’d think that he’d be saying to himself, “Sweet! A dead serial arsonist has escaped my clutches and returned to Earth to torch assorted municipal buildings and elementary schools. I’ll miss watching the imps spear him with pitchforks, but in the end I think this will be a real time saver!”
Instead, Old Scratch sends our hero out to retrieve the escapees, and, in the process, learn valuable lessons about self-worth and personal responsibility. Please excuse the pun, but: what the hell? Turning the Prince of Darkness into a basically good guy who just happens to have a very strong sense of civic duty neuters a terrific, smarmy-yet-menacing performance by Ray Wise. It also effectively defeats the point of having the devil in the show at all. They may as well have made the character a tough-as-nails retired judge, and called the show Hardcastle and Oliver.
But Reaper’s plot seems brilliantly conceived compared to the minimal thought that went into Sam’s obnoxious sidekick buddy, Sock. Sock is apparently the spawn of an unholy union between Jack Black and the Nick Frost character from Shaun of the Dead; in short, slightly more irritating than dropping a stinging nettle down the front of your boxers. The thing is, I don’t really blame the actor, Tyler Labine, or the way he’s been written. Both are actually quite good, when you consider that the show’s creators were deliberately aiming for an accurate representation of an unpleasant, loud-mouthed dipshit. I’ve known my fair share of such people, and I can attest that Sock is the real deal.
Where Reaper goes wrong is in assuming that viewers would want to spend more than five minutes watching one of these assholes. Sure, it’s kind of funny seeing the guy absently wrap yards of duct tape around his hand, then proudly proclaim to his friends, “Tape hand!” — but not for the better part of an hour. I’m not exaggerating when I say that, in the first two episodes of the show, there are a total of about five scenes in which Sock does not feature prominently. And that’s a real problem because, as I may have implied earlier, he sucks a bit.
Things are made worse by the fact that most of Reaper’s much-vaunted humor basically boils down to Sock capering about like a douchebag. The rest of it revolves around the liberal use of fun terms such as “dick”, “tool”, and “asshat.” And while I am decidedly in favor of each of those words, I tend to enjoy them more when they are combined with other words to form some manner of joke. Example:
Funny: “My dick is so big, movie theaters now serve popcorn in Small, Medium, Large, and My Dick.”
Considerably Less Funny: “Dick!”
There’s a lot of other stuff in Reaper that doesn’t make much rational sense. The home improvement warehouse where Sam and Sock work not only allows its employees to run amok in the store with leaf blowers, but also has a sporting goods department exhaustive enough to carry a full selection of SCUBA gear. Andi’s dead parents are mentioned multiple times, awkwardly, seemingly for no reason other than to set up some future episode. Then there’s the fact that Sam doesn’t seem terribly bothered by the fact that he’s eternally damned; if even he doesn’t care about his predicament, why should I?
Yet, in spite of all that, I have to admit that I kind of enjoyed the show. Its mood is winningly light and goofy. Bret Harrison, as Sam, makes a very appealing lead. The special effects that liven up the lost souls are a lot of fun. And if you don’t mind turning the dimmer switch on your brain way down, you might even get a laugh or two out of it. There are far worse ways you could spend an hour, many of them airing on this very network.
Still, with all of Reaper’s failings — its just-barely-there plot, the lack of any reason to care about the characters’ fates, and a massive overabundance of Sock — there just isn’t much reason to keep tuning in. Unless you’re the sort of person who habitually forgets that MXC isn’t on Tuesdays at 9 p.m, that is.
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