And who is Ellen Muth, you ask? She is the lead actress in a television series named Dead Like Me, which aired in 2003 and 2004 on the Showtime Network.

    And why should you care? And why should the Bishop in charge of the Convocation of American Churches in Europe care?

    Well, it all started when my wife Melinda and I started to watch the show in syndication on a French TV channel named “Jimmy” (why it’s named “Jimmy” I don’t know—another French paradox, perhaps). I was rapidly beguiled by the series. In fact, my family has given me the DVDs of both years’ episodes. Ellen Muth plays Georgia Lass, an aimless teenager of relentless cynicism. In the opening episode, her mother, exasperated with her 18-year-old for dropping out of college, announces that “George” will get a job and then move out of the family home. She begins work at “Happy Time,” a temp agency, doing filing. During her lunch break, George meets an elderly black man, who touches her, releasing a mysterious puff of smoke from her body. Then there is a cut to a toilet re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. Cut to George looking up at the sky. Cut toilet, disintegrating. George sees the seat coming at her and has just enough time to cry out a familiar expletive before she is obliterated.

    In a moment she reappears, and realizes that she has died. No one can see her except a fellow named Rube, played by Mandy Patinkin. He takes her away and explains that she has been selected to become a “reaper.” He is the leader of a cell of reapers whose task on Earth is to show up at places where someone will die, make contact with the person (thus releasing the mysterious smoke from their body) and then escorting them after death toward “the light,” which has a different appearance depending on the person’s life.

    George initially refuses, but Rube explains that her choice would lead to dark and ominous consequences. She is designated a a reaper to help her grow, because she is “not interesting enough to go to Hell.” When she reaches a certain unknown number of people she has helped through death (the reaper’s touch allows people to die painlessly), she too will get to go to “the light.” Meanwhile, she has a new life to live, embodied in this world and yet to some extent able to see into the afterlife. George becomes part of a little community of reapers. (see here for an in-depth discussion).

    Dead Like Me is a combination of quirky, often dark humor, sharp commentary on modern life, and genuinely thought-provoking moments on the meaning of life and death. As the  episodes progress, George becomes more mature. The reapers around her, as well as the family she left behind, also evolve, some positively, some not.

    I like the series because it appeals to my theology. I believe that in death, we are resurrected from the dead. As St. Paul says in the fifteenth chapter of I Corinthians, our corpses are “sown in weakness, but raised in glory.” However, the individual circumstances of each life are also unique and this process is therefore probably unique as well, to an extent. This comes out nicely in the show’s writing. Furthermore, while no one is shown to be damned, there is a clear indication that how one lives one’s life matters.

    One could say that the reapers are people in Purgatory. Classically, purgatory has been thought to be a place of purification, usually unpleasantly so, but at its end one does go to Heaven. Anglicans do not have a doctrinal position on this, which one must believe in order to be a Christian (unlike the Creeds, which do speak of sin, judgment and resurrection). Nevertheless, most Anglican theologians have accepted the notion of an intermediate stage in salvation, if only that of “sleeping” until the Last Day, when all shall be raised (see Daniel 12:2).

    I am not convinced about Purgatory, and especially I do not believe in indulgences, that the church has power to release people from Purgatory. Some period of orientation needs to happen, perhaps, before the newly-dead can enter a new phase of life. As for Hell, I am convinced it exists, although as C. S. Lewis remarked, “the gates of hell are locked from the inside.” In other words, you have to work hard to get there. I also think that the only real ghosts exist exclusively in Hell. See Lewis’ The Great Divorce.

    The reapers have doubts about God, even though they know for sure that the dead are not simply annihilated and it is their task to help the dead find the next step in their life. But that step is for the most part concealed from them. What they do witness is how arbitrary and unfair death seems to us. The reapers share what a lot of people today think about death.

    There is also comfort, however. In the final episode of the series, George’s mother and little sister Reggie end up spending Hallowe’en at George’s grave. She goes there and sees them, and her sister is allowed a fleeting vision of George smiling at her.

    I suppose the series was too difficult to keep going. Death is not a subject we like, Six Feet Under notwithstanding. But whereas other members of the cast have gone on to other work, Ellen Muth seems to have disappeared. There is a rumor that MGM will reprise the show on DVD, as a movie.

    I hope Ellen gets more work, and other roles as well. She is a fine actress, and certainly deserves it.

    But show business, like death, does seem quite arbitrary and unfair.