Posted on: June 26, 2009 Posted by: John B. Moore Comments: 0

The show Reaper came along at just the right time. With Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel both dead and gone, there was definitely a void to be filled with a demon-centered goofy fantasy/comedy series.

The fact that the CW was desperate, well, for anything people would turn into for longer than a week, was icing on the cake. Reaper was a good solution at the time, but the ride only lasted for two seasons, when CW cancelled the series in May.

The show, interesting in concept from the beginning clearly started losing steam within the first couple of episodes of this season. Reaper revolves around Sam Oliver (Grounded for Life’s Bret Harrison), a twenty-something who works in retail who finds out that his dad sold him to the devil before he was born. As payback, Sam now works for the Devil (played by an impressive Ray Wise), retrieving damned souls that have snuck out of hell and sending them back. Sam gets help from his buddies the innocuous Benjamin Casper Perez Gonzalez (played by Rick Gonzalez) and Bert “Sock” Wysocki (played by Tyler Labine), likely one of the most annoying characters to come across the small screen in a decade. The charm of shows like Buffy or Angel was in its characters. The folks in Reaper just come off as unsympathetic and whiny.

Additionally, the second season of Reaper begins taking the focus off the stories of the escaped demons (a hallmark of season one) to tell the ongoing relationship drama involving Sam and his buddies. The quirkiness of the show in this instance seems to have been smothered by conventional TV story-telling.

Rating: 6.5 out of 10

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