By Brandon Nolta
No matter how you feel about birthdays, everybody’s had at least one that really and truly sucked. As the new CW series REAPER fires up (yeah, yeah, bad pun alert), Sam Oliver (Bret Harrison) is having one of those really crappy birthdays; in this case, his 21st. He lives at home with his folks and his smarter little brother near Seattle, he works a loser job at a place that makes Home Depot look upscale, he’s too chicken to ask the girl of his dreams (Missy Peregrym) out on a date, he seems to have developed the ability to move objects with his mind randomly, and he has to go home from work because he was chased out of the store by a pack of Hellhounds.
Hellhounds? Yep, that’s right: Hellhounds. It turns out that Sam’s parents sold his soul to the Devil (Ray Wise), to be collected on Sam’s 21st birthday. What kind of screwed-up birthday present is that? Anyway, Old Scratch has turned up to collect, which does absolutely nothing to help Sam’s mood. But it’s not all bad: The Devil actually wants Sam to collect escaped souls and send them back to Hell by dropping them off at a portal, like the DMV. All my suspicions are now confirmed.
There are some of you saying to yourself right now, “People can escape from Hell?” That’s what Sam said, and apparently the answer is “Yes; the place is overcrowded.” There are some others of you saying to yourself right now, “Didn’t this show used to be BRIMSTONE?” That’s what I said, and the answer is “No.” It doesn’t have the wonderful twosome of Peter Horton and John Glover, but it does have a likable young protagonist in the form of Bret Harrison—who is working on establishing the charming slacker archetype for the ‘00s—and best of all, Ray Wise.
Mr. Wise, who’s been doing the character actor thing since the beginning of time, makes a dandy Satan, a cross between ultimate evil and every cheery middle manager you’ve ever run across. This Satan not only enjoys his work, he’s remarkably upbeat about his place in the universe. “Don’t worry,” he tells Sam early on, “I’ve seen how it all turns out. God wins.” Despite this cheery admission, he’s not above the ruthless gesture, like turning a guy into goo with a Zamboni to illustrate his views on failure. Wise has developed a persona for the Devil unlike any I’ve ever seen in movies or TV, deciding to play up the banality of evil without completely abandoning the massive darkness everybody from Viggo Mortensen to Robert De Niro has put into theirs. It’s a weird choice, but perfect for this off-kilter series.
Whether this series can survive is a tough question to answer in one episode. It’s damn funny (yeah, yeah), but the tone the creators are playing REAPER in is a hard one to pull off, and any lengthy stay in this universe is going to require some shows to go quite a bit darker. Still, I laughed all the way through this premiere episode (mostly because of Tyler Labine’s antics as Sam’s best bud Sock), and with a little luck, REAPER will continue to give Tuesday nights a taste of that ol’ black magic.