Reaper
- You may be looking for Grim Reapers from Dead Like Me. For the Overwatch character, see Gabriel Reyes.
| Fandom | |
|---|---|
| Name: | Reaper |
| Abbreviation(s): | |
| Creator: | Michele Fazekas and Tara Butters |
| Date(s): | September 25, 2007 – May 26, 2009 |
| Medium: | Live-action TV series |
| Country of Origin: | United States |
| External Links: | Reaper at Wikipedia, TV.com, IMDB |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Reaper was a CW comedy-drama television series that focuses on Sam Oliver (played by Bret Harrison), a "reaper" who works for the Devil (played by Ray Wise) by retrieving souls that have escaped from Hell. He's joined by his best friends, Bert "Sock" Wysocki (played by Tyler Labine) and Benjamin "Ben" Gonzalez (played by Rick Gonzalez), and his co-worker and love interest Andi Prendergast (played by Missy Peregrym). Fazekas is the former assistant of Frank Spotnitz and as an assistant to TPTB during the 6th season of The X-Files.
Fandom
The Reaper fandom is fairly small compared to other CW fandoms[1]. Most of the fandom is focused in LiveJournal and FanFiction.net, where people posted discussions or fanworks. It wasn't until the series was over that fandom migration to Tumblr and Archive of Our Own became more common, and the fandom appeared with a few discussion posts and fanworks.
Reaper was one of the shows affected by Writer's Guild of America Writer's Strike; it was put on hiatus until April 2008, when the remaining eight episodes of its first season aired. Reaper's renewal and second season was due to fans sending socks to the network[2][3][4]. The show returned the next year as a midseason show. The CW cancelled the show near the end of the second season, much to the chagrin of the fans of the series - attempts to sell the show other networks failed as well. In 2013, FEARnet made a syndication deal to air the entire series. May 28, FEARnet aired a 30-minute reunion special; during which the reunion cast members left open the possibility that a campaign could help finance the production of a season 3 of Reaper.
Due to similar storylines/genre and dealing with Lucifer and Demons, crossovers with Supernatural was fairly common.
Shipping
Sevil is the pairing name of Sam/Devil, the most popular pairing in the fandom. Other pairings that appeared within the fandom are mainly slash, such as Morgan/Sam, Steve/Tony (Note: not that Steve/Tony!) and Sam/Sock. The crossover pairing of Sam/Sam Winchester also appeared. The three most common het pairings are Andi/Sam, Ben/Nina, and Marlena/Sock. Gen works also appeared.
Creator's plans for Season 3
In February 2010, the show's creators gave an interview that detailed some of their ideas for season three[5]:
"hoped to put Andi to work at the DMV with Gladys."
"If you remember, Dad wasn’t dead. And there was a whole reason why he wasn’t dead. Basically, the whole premise that never actually had the chance to come out was the idea that Dad was a demon, who made a deal with the Devil. He fell in love with Sam’s mom and wanted to marry her. So the deal was, fine, you’re not a demon anymore. He was never fully human, either, which is why you can’t kill him. So, in the pilot, when he said he was really sick and made a deal with the Devil, he wasn’t 100% lying nor 100% telling the truth. And this is the reason why Sam is special: Sam is part human, part demon."
"Sam was led to believe he was the Devil’s son, but that wasn’t true. That’s not the reason Sam had powers — the powers came from his father. His father was really his father. And part of his deal was that he was never really allowed to tell Sam the truth, and that’s the reason why he says to him ‘there’s more to this than I can tell you.’ And part of what we tried to get out of all of this was that Sam really is special. That’s the reason why, at the end of the last season, Steve comes to him and says Sam is caught between good and evil. What we hoped to get out of the third season was what part did Sam have to play? Sam’s whole existence, and the reason the Devil was paying so much attention to him and hanging out with him so much was because there was a reason: Sam was half-human and half-demon, and the Devil was really worried that this kid was going to be his downfall. If you look at what the Devil is doing throughout the series, he’s trying to tempt Sam to be bad. And he’s trying to tempt him to embrace this, that what you’re doing isn’t so bad. The whole point was that if he can turn Sam bad, the Sam isn’t a threat anymore."
"We talked a little about bringing the Archangel Michael in, but no, I actually think I never wanted to see God. And there was discussion of whether or not we wanted to see Hell, and what that would be like."
Fanworks
| Examples Wanted: Editors are encouraged to add more examples or a wider variety of examples. |
Fanart
Archives & Fannish Links
- Reaper & crossover works at FFN
- Reaper works at AO3
- Reaper DMV, a message board for Reaper
LJ Communities
Resources
References
<references>
- ^ As of May 8, 2017: there are 106 works at FFN, 68 works at AO3, reaper_tv has 230 members; the other Reaper LJ communities range from 50-95.
- ^ Tumblr post stating it. 3 Aug 2011.
- ^ Save Reaper, Socks to The CW
- ^ Latest Save-a-Show Effort: Socks to Save Reaper!
- ^ How Reaper would have ended, straight from the creators. Keith McDuffee. Cliqueclack.com