"Reaper:" Well, that happened

The CW may not care about "Reaper," even though it's getting about the same number of viewers as "Gossip Girl" without any of the marketing hype, but ABC Studios, its producers, do, so they sent out a screener of tonight's episode.

In it, Andi (Missy Peregrym) sees Sam (Bret Harrison) behead a demon. As you might imagine, this is not good. Sam makes a deal with the Devil (Ray Wise) to get permission to explain his job to Andi. This is worse. Ben's (Rick Gonzalez) social life experiences an uptick. This, believe it or not, could be even worse.

"Reaper's" one of those shows that started out charmingly enough, what with the beheadings and all, but sort of crumpled under the demands of churning out a full season of episodes. There are a couple of laughs, but the plotting is sloppy and the direction that tries to distract you from the low-budget production in fact underscores the clunky way they avoid, um, executing certain maneuvers. Tyler Labine, amazingly enough, has not grown tiresome as Sock and in fact remains amusing, even though his punchlines aren't as sharp.

If The CW cancels this - which looks likely - ABC Studios should just move the show over to ABC Family. Its ratings couldn't get any worse, and could just possibly improve.

- "Reaper:" 9 tonight; The CW (Channel 5).