A little TV challenge as well

So last night I finished the two seasons of Reaper on Netflix.It was a good show, I remember my brother watching it when it was on, and it is one of many TV series that I have recently pushed myself through since the beginning of my senior year. If I want to be a critic as I've mentioned before or write for TV or something in that vein, I can't just work at the café and watch TV in my free time and call it a day. I need to do something with that, engage a little more, make myself sink deeper. So I've decided that from now on, when I finish a TV series, I'm going to try to write at least a little blog post about it. Whether it has a point or a review or a message is up to me and depends on the series itself, but I'm going to try to do it.

Reaper (2007-2009). Creators Michele Fazekas and Tara Butters.
Plot rundown: Sam Oliver is a 21-year-old slacker whose soul was sold to the Devil by his parents before he was born, and now the Devil has come to collect. However, Sam's fate isn't quite as hell-bound as it might seem: instead, the Devil enlists him as a bounty hunter, essentially reclaiming escaped souls and sending them back to hell in whatever normal-looking vessel is assigned to that particular case. Cue drama.
I liked the concept well enough, and the characters were well-developed from the get-go. Yes they were a little played out--Sam (Bret Harrison) is the whiney can't-do-anything-right anti-hero, Andi (Missy Peregrym) is the gorgeous and witty out-of-his-league co-worker, Sock and Ben (Tyler Labine and Rick Gonzalez, respectively) is the bumbling sidekicks who nevertheless accept Sam's new part-time as pretty much awesome. They grow on you, true enough, and as more regulars make their way into the ensemble, the puzzle becomes a little clearer. One thing I had a problem with was the incredibly heavy-handed portrayal of Andi as the saint, uncomfortable with Sam's seemingly cavalier relationship to the Devil to the point that she breaks it off with him. I do, as do many other viewers I'm sure, appreciate the irony of Sam trying to do good by working for the biggest bad, and the show dealt with it in a way that was almost over-the-top cheesy--there was no room for stone-faced seriousness. The character of Tony, for example, (played by Ken Marino) creates the Church of Steve for recovering demons to fight hell by doing good one day at a time after his lover, Steve, was killed in the first revolt against Satan (which was brought to a head by getting the Devil's cell phone number--who would've known?).
It was a wonderfully quirky buddy comedy, and surely cancelled too soon. While the writing wasn't always stellar, the soul-of-the-week plotline was less tedious than it is on other shows, mostly because the soul fit the weekly angst sometimes it was captured in the first five minutes. But complications always ensued. Rarely formulaic, the structure of the show gave enough time to all of its characters for it to feel like not just Sam Oliver's Problems every week.