'Reaper' lightens up, but characters need refining

May 6, 2008

There's no doubt that "Reaper" (8 p.m. Tuesday, WGN-Ch. 9) has improved greatly since the fall.

The trouble is, the show had a long way to go. After a deft pilot, in which we met the hapless retail clerk Sam (Bret Harrison) and saw him become a bounty hunter for a dapper Devil (Ray Wise), "Reaper" quickly became a chore to watch.

The good news is that, on a storytelling level, "Reaper" has picked up the pace considerably.

The smartest thing the show's writers have done in the past few episodes is borrow even more heavily from the playbook of Joss Whedon, the peerless genre master who created shows such as "Buffy," "Angel" and "Firefly," all of which are "Reaper's" most obvious antecedents. In the second half of the season, Sam and his buddies moved into a new apartment, and living next door was a pair of gay demons, who were the best thing that ever happened to "Reaper" (aside from Wise).

Michael Ian Black ("Ed") and Ken Marino ("Veronica Mars"), who played the misunderstood demons Steve and Tony, were everything the show needed them to be—light, funny, full of potentially dangerous secrets and part of a revolutionary demon group that was trying to overthrow the Devil.

Let's see, a dramatic, multiepisode story arc—check. Witty characters you look forward to spending time with—check. A band of plucky friends uniting against an unpredictable, charismatic villain—check. Yes, most of the Whedon hallmarks were there in the last few "Reaper" episodes—with one glaring exception. The characters on this show still need a lot of work. After more than a dozen episodes, here's what I know about Sam's co-worker, Andi (Missy Peregrym)—that Sam has a crush on her. That's the only defining characteristic the writers have given this utterly bland character.

And though Sam's wisecracking friend Bert "Sock" Wysocki (Tyler Labine) can be amusing, Sam's other friend, Ben (Rick Gonzalez), could be summarized as "the guy who is not Sock." Ben has no real personality of his own, and even Sam is still not particularly compelling.

On May 13, the CW will announce what shows it is bringing back after a rocky season. The buzzed-about "Gossip Girl" is likely to return, but "Reaper's" fate is still up in the air.

Given "Reaper's" strong upward trajectory and its largely untapped potential, I'm rooting for its return. And I'm begging the network to hire "Angel" co-creator and Whedon associate David Greenwalt to run the show next season. Greenwalt would be the ideal creative mind to take "Reaper" to the next level and rescue it from its rather mechanical approach to character creation.

moryan@tribune.com