Dead Like Me was a comedy-drama created by Bryan Fuller for Showtime. Fuller ended up leaving the show over "creative differences" after five episodes and the show was cancelled because of dropping quality after only two seasons. Fuller said working with Showtime was one of the worse experiences of his life and that they constantly attempted to cut important parts of the show, resulting in a loss of quality. After the TV show was cancelled a movie, Dead Like Me: Life After Death, was released in an attempt to close some story lines.

The pilot episode opens on Georgia 'George' Lass (Ellen Muth) sitting in the waiting room of a temp agency. Eventually she is interviewed by Delores Herbig (Christine Willes), as in "Her big brown-eyes", who finds her wanting. Delores informs her that she is hardly qualified for any work and the work for which she is qualified is remedial, repetitive and really boring. George returns home to have dinner with her nagging mother, Joy (Cynthia Stevenson), her closeted father, Clancy (Greg Kean), and her little sister who she pretends doesn't exist, Reggie (Britt McKillip). George heads to sleep after escorting Reggie out of her room.

In the morning she is awoken by her mother who tells her it is time she learned to be on her own and forces her off to work. Her work is boring filing that is pretty uneventful. Eventually she is allowed to take her hour long lunch break (which only lasts 35 minutes). While returning to work she is hit by a toilet seat falling from space which does not leave her in the best of shape. The rest of the episode covers what dying means and eventually want becoming a reaper means. She meets her reaper boss, Rube Sofer (Mandy Patinkin), and her reaper coworkers: Mason (Callum Blue), Roxy (Jasmine Guy), and Betty (Rebecca Gayheart). She also learns that a large part of being a reaper is figuring out a way to live off of the property and money left behind by the recently unalive.

The episode, near the end, takes a tonal shift when George is asked for the first time to reap a soul. The soul she is asked to reap belongs to a young child, no more then ten years old, traveling on a train by herself. Unable to sit by while the child dies George saves the girl and refuses to reap her soul. Rube explains that souls expire and that failure to reap the girl will mean her soul rots inside her. At the end of the episode we see the girls soul pass over into the after-life, which looks a lot like a carnival.

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