Playing Dead Plays with the Grim Reaper Legend

Right from the beginning, the web series Playing Dead has one major obstacle to overcome. Dead Like Me, the 2003 Showtime series created by Bryan Fuller, already exists, and over two seasons it did a pretty thorough job of chronicling the lives of Grim Reapers operating under the guise of normal human lives.

However, there are plenty of differences to the story of Grace (Suzanne Keilly), a struggling Los Angeles actress who takes a part-time job with Death to pay the bills: for one thing, Death in this series is a full-on Seventh Seal-esque reaper. For another, Grace isn’t dead herself, just offering some assistance to those passing between roles. So despite the familiarity of the material, the indie series, written by Keilly and directed by Ted Raimi (who genre television fans ought to recognize from the 1990s series Hercules, Xena: Warrior Princess or SeaQuest DSV) manages to find its own voice over the four episodes released since its premiere in January.

It helps that the morbid streak to the episodes that have aired so far is balanced nicely by Grace’s comical self-centeredness, which takes that doom and gloom and transforms Dead into a pretty entertaining black comedy. And the cast is solid, with future episodes including appearances by Totally RAD Show hosts Jeff Cannata and Alex Albrecht.

The big catch with Playing Dead (and man, I never have this complaint) is that the episodes are too short. While the runtime on the first episode, for example, is listed as being three minutes and 42 seconds, that’s deceptive thanks to the fact that the opening and end credits consume about 1:30 of that. Plus, the cliffhanger ending reveals nothing about the show’s premise, making me wish that they’d just combined it with the following episode in order to form a much more complete pilot for the series.

Of the episodes posted so far Episode 4 is by far the strongest of the series — with about three minutes of real footage, Raimi and Keilly come close to telling a fairly complete story, and one with a clever ending at that (though those with clown phobias should be forewarned). So, if that trend manages to continue, Playing Dead will deserve a long life.

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