Filmmaker Kevin Smith (Clerks, Dogma) is a common type of modern American: vulgar but religious. His movies include large doses of vulgarity and profanity accompanied by an evidently sincere search for the sacred. His new CW series Reaper, which premiered this past Tuesday in its regular timeslot of 9 p.m. EDT), is both raucous and religious, and is one of the best things he’s done.
As Smith’s films tend to do, Reaper follows the adventures of two slackers, in this case Sam Oliver and Bert Wysocki, two college-age but not college-attending workers at the local big retail store. Although Sam is intelligent enough to go to college, he has low self-esteem and little ambition and so decided not to—and his parents went along with his decision.
The reason they did so is the bad news: Sam’s parents sold his soul to the devil long before he was born, and the Evil One gets to collect when Sam turns twenty-one.
(They had very good reasons, of course. They’re actually quite nice people and love Sam dearly.)
Naturally the first episode begins on Sam’s twenty-first birthday, and he finds out the awful truth: he must serve out the rest of his life as the devil’s bounty hunter, tracking down souls that have escaped from Hell and returning them to their proper place of torment. In between captures, he gets to live his normal life working at the retail store, hanging out with his buddies and trying to win the love of coworker Andi.
These escaped souls are pretty formidable, as you may imagine, and Sam is terrified at the enormity of the assignment. Of course, the Evil One doesn’t send poor Sam out into battle entirely defenseless: in each episode he gives Sam a different device to use for trapping the escaped souls. In the pilot episode, it is a Dirt Devil portavac.
Oddly enough, this terrifying new job actually gives Sam’s life some real meaning for once—sending evil souls to where they belong actually turns out to be very satisfying and important work.
It’s rather like the CW program Supernatural but a good deal more cheerful.
If all of this sounds either amusing or meaningful, you should give Reaper a try.