Not Actually One-Sentence Reviews: Reaper
It’s I Can’t Believe It’s Not Clerks, guest starring Satan.
Three episodes in, and I want to like it. I really do. And actually the whole thing with the normal guy becoming Satan’s bounty hunter and forced to capture escaped souls using ridiculously arbitrary household items actually kind of works. It’s all the other shit that brings it down.
I already saw Clerks. I already saw Clerks II. And you know what else? I managed to go to college and start a career without becoming some joyless fuckwit. So stop this bullshit about having to choose between dead end jobs and going to college, and stop pretending that college is… Jesus, you know, I don’t even know why these characters are so terrified of it. But at least in Clerks you were supposed to think Dante was an idiot for letting laziness and inertia force him to put up with his shitty, miserable life. Reaper honestly expects us to think that these people enjoy being bossed around by an incompetent manager at a place they don’t want to be.
I’m just not into watching a show full of characters who think that the only alternative to slaving to death in the rat race of careerist conformity is being a feckless loser content to be shit on by anyone and anything. Who also works for Satan.
Maybe they’ll surprise me and take things in an interesting direction. Maybe there will be some moral about how stasis is Hell; they made a small step that way at the end of episode three when Satan played a direct role in forcing Andy (Andi?) to drop her college ambitions. But probably not.
Also? The attempt to Lampshade Hang the Reset Button at the end of the last episode was a complete failure. A shitty trope is a shitty trope, and all they accomplished was calling attention to its shittiness. Way to go.