Bringing it back? More than 10 years have passed and we won't be seeing the original show and arcs picked up - at least not in this life. But...
Take a look at this series - New Amsterdam, which came out in 2008 and fumbled around before getting canceled after one season:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0928414/?ref_=nv_sr_1
It wasn't bad and I felt the writers were getting things together and then it got cut.
Fast forward to the current season and take a look at this series - Forever, which is very similar to the one above. It's better - the same, but different.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3487382/?ref_=nv_sr_1
That's how we might see DLM again. New name and characters but pretty much same situation.
Can you imagine Reggie fast-forwarded to an adult version? That just wouldn't work. There's no way she and George could have the kind of meaningful interactions they did when she was still the kid sister.
I have a different take on this. I liked what Fuller did in the original set up but after he left and Godchaux and others took over it became clear that there was a meeting planned between the two. The series cut off that arc abruptly with the compromise meeting in the very last scene of the series at the end of S2. In that scene at George's grave she and Reggie meet face to face, but neither says anything and George walks away.
The Movie made that meeting happen in a clumsy way, but what it showed to me was that it would work. And I wondered why Fuller set up the original with an 18 year old George and an 11 year old younger sister. The eventual meeting works better if the two are closer in age. Perhaps Fuller had some other end game planned.
But it looked to me like Godchaux in S2 was setting things up for an eventual coming together. One undead sister trapped into a fate in which she never ages and can't live a normal existence in contact with her living sister who is aging and living a normal life.
I don't know where Godchaux was planning to take the story, but I wrote out a fan fiction novel with some of my ideas. Same novel at either link below (links updated June 2016):
Dead Like Me Rebooted 2013http://www.ellen-muth.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1530http://www.ellen-muth.co.uk/ellen-muth/ellen/index.php?topic=11.0The first and last of the 88 chapters are set in the far future, 2113, on the day of Reggie's funeral. George still looks as if she had just left High School, and Reggie died at age 122. The story then jumps back to 1927 to fill in the back story for Rube and his role in bringing the two sisters together, before picking up the main story in 2013.
The novel started as an attempt to write a scene in which Reggie could learn about reapers and George without the Memory Rule being broken - a reaper cannot use a common memory with someone they knew when alive to prove who they are. If they attempt it they lose the memory. That rule is core to the original set up by Fuller and was in an early episode - when George tries to go home.
I found I could write something that worked but then what came before and after that scene needed to come out. I also found that when I shifted from interpreting what was in S1 &2 to creating a story within the DLM Universe there were problems. So I apologize to those who maybe are expecting a true to form DLM Universe as it was laid out in the two seasons. I worked around that and added a lot of new things to make it more logical and workable.
For example, there were hints early on that Fuller might have been thinking that the reapers were more ghost like than they eventually were portrayed. I suspect they shifted more towards a human like physical presence in order to make it harder to get to their reaps e.g. when George has to struggle to get to the singer who died on stage. It was also hinted strongly that the living tend to look past or look thru reapers. I added new twists in that reapers can enter that in between dimension i.e. become invisible to to the living and when moving about they can will their noticeability by the living to near zero.
And when they break rules among reapers and take someone alive into the in between dimension, what happens to them?
PS // spoilers for the novel follow -
Whatever the rules what is interesting to me is this relationship between the sisters - one undead and the other very much alive.
The 100 years bookended by the first and last chapters contain the expanding relationship that grew out of George's early haunting of her family and in particular her refusal to leave Reggie alone. Reggie in turn tracked down George and learned what she is and that leads to her being drawn into a relationship with her sister.
Rube's descendants - we know from the series that Rosie got married - get very much involved with Trip's, Reggie's, and Daisy's. With time George and Reggie become matriarchs of a large clan- one is the public face and the other is hidden unrecognized, but at the center. The linchpin - from the first novel - is Trip's nephew, who pulls their fates and those of their offspring together.
Reapers are not created equal. They all have the primary job of reaping and escorting souls to the other side, but their talents vary. George, as it came out in the series, has some unique talents, which by 2013 become more known among the reaper community. Upper management or Death already knew about those talents and plays a very long game.
Links to sequel:
Dead Like Me Rebooted 2014http://www.ellen-muth.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1547http://www.ellen-muth.co.uk/ellen-muth/ellen/index.php?topic=13.0
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Danioton
10 years ago
Britt McKillip (Reggie) on the left with her real sister on the right:
http://www.liveinlimbo.com/2014/10/14/concert-reviews/one-more-girl-th e-stellas-at-norfolk-fair.html
All grown up - 23 years old.
And in Dead Like Me - George - the 'older' sister - forever 18:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0616091/
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vbel
10 years ago
Both can also be seen in last years TV movie Coming Home for Christmas.
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GraceFromSoCal
10 years ago
Wow, wow, wow! That's all I can say, Danioton! I will take a look at the link as it sounds quite interesting.
And thanks for the pic of Britt and her sister; I honestly would never have recognized her from that picture.
I loved DLM. I mean really, really loved it. It spoke to me in a way no other show ever had before. It still pisses me off that it was a casualty of changes at Showtime, but at least I have the DVDs.
--
Nature photography on jigsaw puzzles:
http://tinyurl.com/ocxtgct
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raz-campbell
8 years ago
In response to you saying Ellen Muth/ Georgia Lass looked 'forever 18'...
In the boo-vie (the movie that most people disliked, hence the 'boo') Ellen Muth's bone structure in her face and head continued to develop from her younger self (during the series). She looks far worse in the movie, I'm sorry to say.
In the series, she was a sweet looking, lost soul. In the movie, she's a strange-faced young adult. Even if they continued making DLM episodes after the crappy movie, it would have lost something essential, in that the casting would no longer have been as perfect as it was in its heyday...
Just my 4 cents...
Peace
Razar the Razarian
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