a very boring show

I was hoping you'd list all the interesting things that happened.

Grown ups? This was rather a teen series.

I'm thinking that maybe the show is too subtle for today's viewers. For someone to say this show is boring and nothing happens confuses me. What did they watch? Surely not the same thing I did. All of the ironic events, references to classic literature, film, and music, even the names of characters. All over op's head.

Many top rated shows don't share ratings demographic.

I know several people who liked both Six Feet Under and DLM, but I never could get thru more than the pilot or maybe two episodes of the former.

I know people who thought highly of Touched by an Angel but are offended by the DLM universe setting and it's implications. And I wouldn't be surprised that many professional writers of the secular humanist persuasion in Hollywood were mystified that TBA was the top rated show for a few years.

I do not know how anyone watching DLM week to week could follow the real story (vs the shiny object surface plots highlighted for each episode), because I watched it on DVD after it was already off the air.

If you watch the episodes back to back, for me at least, the main themes are more obvious and therefore enjoyable, and not boring at all.

I was listening to an interview with Jonah Lehrer (book 'Imagine' with the made up Dylan quotes) recently in which he was pointing to the time around when DLM and Lost came out as when there was a shift in storytelling on TV (which was responding to the Internet effects on the way people want their stories told). He cited Lost as the key marker for the change. Before Lost for most TV shows the makers of the stories took great care to make sure all the key plot points were obvious to most everyone, but with Lost they deliberately left out key facts that made the goings on a puzzle.

DLM was on just before Lost, and I suspect it was testing a variation of that story telling shift. In DLM a lot of important aspects of the DLM universe and the goings are left ambiguous - no attempt to explain or clarify. In the early forums I remember a lot of people mentioned that ambiguity as a positive aspect attracting them to the story, but there's no doubt IMO that it made the main story themes harder to identify and follow especially when the episodes were separated by a week long break.



I don't find DLM boring at all, but going thru the second season episode by episode one idea that's surfaced concerns certain plotting choices that the people who took over from Fuller early in S1 made and that may have been a strategic mistake.

There were three main plotting themes from the beginning - initiated by Fuller - that I can see. The first two concern Georgia and her coming to terms with her own death and then her struggles to help her sister, Reggie, vs her mother. The third focused on the relationship between Rube and Georgia - that got truncated at the end of S2 IMO.

After Fuller was forced out the new guys brought in Daisy to replace Betty and then proceeded to spend a lot of screen time to develop Daisy - they obviously liked her a lot - the only main character that they created whole.

I like the Daisy character and what they did with her, but much of the time spent on her crowded out the development of those three main themes in particular that third one involving Rube and Georgia. Rube's back story involving what happened to him and his family just was getting started in S2 and the telling of that backstory was a necessary groundwork to the development of what was coming between Rube and Georgia and IMO Reggie.

Some of the goings on with Daisy could have been incorporated into George leaving more time to have moved things along in S2 with Reggie and her tracking down George. This accelerated version might have held a larger audience.

Reggie kept getting very concrete evidence that George tho dead was around in some form. George in her periodic visits to her old house for example once stopped to do Reggie's math homework - in her own handwriting. She would leave her pictures at the toilet seat tree in a box marked 'George's Box' - that she lifted from her house in one of her forays back home. And then there were the pets she left and the phone calls with no voice. Joy was getting indications too but for her that George was around was just not an option. The family picture went missing along with a TV (she accused Reggie of stealing that) and she was getting the phone calls too.

The differences on this as Reggie at first told her parents she thought George was around kept getting her into therapy sessions until she learned to control matters.

I believe that the story tension as Reggie against all the establishment figures in her world following the evidence to eventually finding George and then forcing a meeting with her would have been much higher than what we saw in S2.

Rube was involved with his family in Seattle during that first year of his death and as a reaper. And then something big happened that persuaded him to stay completely away until he met up with young George and her stubborn refusal to stay away from her own nearby family. From the beginning Rube was extreme in his reactions to what she was doing. Whatever happened to Rube would have been revealed to the audience and would have likely alerted the audience that Reggie's learning too much about reapers was not a safe pathway. Unfortunately she would not have been able to choose not to go forward because to know the why would already be knowing too much. She would have gone forward.

It comes out that Rube tried to send an envelope filled with cash to his wife and daughter almost 80 years prior to when S2 takes place. That was probably just a hint of his total involvement with them during that period. The PTB - the upper management in DLM about which we learn nothing directly - knew what he did and sidelined the envelope and held it for those 80 years, and then, returned it to him. Why the PTB would do that, given it's obvious likely effect on Rube, is never focused on directly, but it's an intriguing embedded question.

The PTB chose to place George under Rube's care so close to her family and their collision was not hard to predict as Rube the believer in the reaper code insisted she stay away from her family even as young George was predictably drawn to 'haunt' them. She went back to talk to Joy at the garage sale and she sat down with her father at the diner to find out whether he still missed her (the diner she and he used to visit every Sunday when she was very small).

In most episodes there's one or two scenes in which Rube and George sit down together and move this third theme forward as their intertwined destinies are slowly (perhaps too slowly for many) revealed.

For example, when Rube finds out about the envelope he is devastated almost catatonic as he sits in the Waffle Haus unmoving for a very long time - until his protege, George, shows up and tho she doesn't know the backstory either it's she who gets him up and moving again. And what does he do? but begin the search for his wife and daughter. He finds his wife died (and finds her gravestone) and finally locates his daughter. We know he visited her at the facility she was staying at (Penny, the reaper, at the old folks home gives him her address in one episode as an easily missed action point that was not highlighted or mentioned again).

In one of the last episodes we get to see Rube meet up with his daughter just before she dies. Note that his daughter recognizes him in his reaper form. This to me implies that she knew Rube was her father in his reaper form from when she was a young girl (the time of the envelope) and/or Rube took Penny's earlier information and visited her somehow communicating who he was (despite the Memory Loss Rule when a reaper's attempt to convey their former living identity to one of the living - especially a living relative). Neither option was shown to the audience in S2 and probably which option or both would have been in the backstory in S3 OR could have been in an accelerated S2 minus the time spent on Daisy.

What was shown of this third theme was only a small part of the full story with the primary Reggie side of the story left unfinished. We did see a hint of it in the Movie which did bring George and Reggie together, but without the key Rube part which was to be the catalyst bringing them together it was missing a lot of energy.

So Rube was clearly greatly impacted by George. This was told to us in a couple of ways. One was early in the last episode, when Rube gives George the mask to hide her double face from the living who might have known her from when she was alive, she catches him at the exit to the Waffle Haus and asks him what's stopping her from going home and revealing herself to her family. Rube says nothing at all would stop her. Rube has been thoroughly shaken from his original reaper code.

But what happened to George? She was greatly affected by her being brought together with Rube. This is captured in the last scene of the last episode of S2. George goes to her gravesite and finds Joy and Reggie asleep. She looks as she did when alive, so what does she do? She leaves some candy for Reggie to find - more evidence- and then walks away. Reggie wakes up and sees her and George looks back, and then chooses to walk away. So Rube left her with something too and she understands that she has to leave the living alone, or as she running away she says in the voice over 'It's not so bad being dead like me.' as she embraces her reaper destiny.

IMO in S3 we would have gotten a meeting forced by Reggie as she tracked down George's whereabouts - something George would have tried to avoid. Anyway, very boring for some.

I'll never understand how people can just find this show "alright". Six Feet Under was contrived and not as deep as this show.

I guess it helps my life and family resembles George a lot. But....it was a very subtle show, a neautiful one, to me. Maybe a very broad one, mixing in seinfeldian comedy with black comedy with sci-fi and broken family drama.......

You are a fail.

My feet smells like *beep* Its because I stepped on dog poop.