As any devil will you tell you, collecting souls is a heck of a job.
People can get awful ratty when a devil shows up and demands their soul. The excuses that devils hear must be comical. ''I lost it.'' ''I'll mail it to you. Seriously, I will.'' ''My ex-husband has it. Talk to the lawyer.'' That sort of thing.
It's no wonder that there have been a number of TV dramas about fellas collecting souls or protecting people from selling their souls. It's a very complicated racket, so there is lots of room for variations on the theme. A few years ago, there was a nifty drama on Fox, called Brimstone, about a dead cop who goes to hell but is returned to the world by the Devil to recover a number of escaped evil spirits.
What with devils, lost souls and a lot of angst going on, actors love these stories. It makes for an inordinate amount of moody acting -- frowning, glaring, muttering and making pronouncements about good and evil.
There's another one starting tonight.
The Collector (Space, 9 p.m.) is a new Canadian production and everybody involved has gone mad for moodiness. It is mainly about Morgan Pym (Chris Kramer), a chisel-jawed chap who looks good considering that he was born in 1322. Apparently he was a monk back in the 14th century and developed an unfortunate thing for a gal. She got sick when the plague hit, and Morgan made a deal with the Devil -- he got 10 years with the gal and in return had to work for the bad old guy. Ever since, he's been morosely calling on people to tell them that the deal they made with the Devil has come due and they have 48 hours to get their kit and caboodle together.
When we meet him, he's in Vancouver, of all places. He's wandering the alleys, which happen to be peopled with hookers and junkies who look like runway models. (Dominic Da Vinci would be shocked.) He meets a beautiful young junkie named Maya (Carly Pope from the series Popular) and Maya reminds him of the girl he loved in the old days. That gal had the plague, and this one suffers from the modern plague -- she's a junkie with AIDS. Symmetry is everything in these shows.
Smitten and sentimental, he makes a new deal with the Devil. This deal allows him to try to save the souls he's supposed to collect. The Devil is amused and likes the idea of the wretched bad-asses attempting to become good people in 48 hours.
Thus we have the basis for the series -- can Morgan convince fools who sold their souls to the Devil that they can repent and make good in 48 hours? Then there's the blossoming love between Morgan and Maya. Just to make matters interesting, there's a pesky Vancouver reporter, Jeri (Ellen Dubin), who is trying to figure out what the heck is going on with this Morgan fella. The Jeri character will undoubtedly shock the Vancouver newspaper community. She tells some guy that her editor is "more interested in my ass than my writing."
Tonight's first episode is entertaining but dead serious in the way that these supernatural tales always are. Morgan Pym is a bit of a bore and the Maya character doesn't amount to much more than a beautiful rag doll. Dubin perks it up as the pesky reporter, but it's the Devil who steals the show. He appears in different forms, but always he's a wily, sarcastic, smart-alecky and terrifically appealing.
The Collector, created by Jon Cooksey and Ali Marie Matheson, is slick enough nonsense and not the really cheap but snappy Canadian drama we have seen recently from the CHUM channels. Tonight's episode, directed by Holly Dale, leans heavily on the seriousness of it all, but future episodes try to sex it up -- there's one involving a supermodel and another involving a teenage skating star. God bless them all.
Witness: Friendly Fire (CBC, 9 p.m.) is an excellent, powerful start to a new season of Witness. A sharp, sometimes profoundly sad and anger-inducing documentary, Friendly Fire is about two incidents. The program opens with what happened in Afghanistan in 2002, when Canadian soldiers were killed by friendly fire from Americans. Many of us have seen part of the footage of the incident from the point of view of the American plane and it is still stunning and horrifying to see it unfold here.
The other incident happened 50 years ago and stands as the worst friendly-fire incident in Canadian history -- 65 Canadian died. It happened in the French town of Caen, not long after D-Day as the Allied forces advanced. American bombers were sent to root out a German battalion that was still holding on fiercely in the town. The bombs landed on the 7th Canadian Medium Regiment.
The documentary, made by Scott Harper, gains its greatest power not from descriptions and footage of what happened in these awful incidents, but from interviews with the relatives and friends of those who died. They are the people who struggle to deal with deaths that not only cause pain, but cause a soul-destroying puzzlement because the deaths are officially described as "accidents."
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