Do you guys have background shows?

I don’t mean “shows about whose background you are very familiar, a la being aware that Judith Light’s background, before she joined Ugly Betty,involved wondering who was the boss and crying all the time on a soap opera my mom used to watch.”

By “background shows,” I mean programs that you turn on while you’re do other stuff. Before I got DVR, I didn’t have a single one. I just had my radio, like I was Laura Ingalls Wilder. Now, however, when I’m cleaning the living room or doing home yoga (namaste!), I like to boot up a series that doesn’t require my full attention.

Currently, that means I Windex my glass-topped coffee table while watching Family Feud. So! Addictive!

But before the Feud, I was backgrounding Reaper. At first, it was appropriate. The show was interesting enough, but not so good that it required Lost- or 30 Rock-levels of focus.

Then a funny thing happened: About four weeks ago, Reaper turned awesome. So awesome, in fact, that I need to write two separate posts about the season finale, just to explain all the reasons I loved it.

Let’s start with this: The season finale proved that Reaper, unlike many films and TV shows, can depict male friendships without being smug or mawkish, and without treating women like crap.

For the uninitiated, there are three buddies at the heart of the series: Front-and-center is Sam (Bret Harrison), who has to capture escaped souls and send them back to Hell, because his parents sold his soul to the Devil. Helping him on this demonic bounty hunt are Bert “Sock” Wysocki (Tyler Labine) and Ben (Rick Gonzalez), who are also his co-workers at The Work Bench (essentially Home Depot.)

These guys are often your standard, hetero-male doofuses, meaning they drink beer, make stupid jokes, and hang up posters of supermodels in the messy apartment they all share. And as happens with so many male characters who are geeky in a Judd Apatow sort of way, they started the season bathed in ironic affection.

As in, they’d hug and say they loved each other, but the hug was framed as something weird. We were meant to laugh at these clueless guys who didn’t know how to be macho. Or else the guys would laugh and talk about how “gay” they were.

So basically, they were the guys from Scrubs. This is why Reaper was in the background for me. At first, I was just tuning in to see Ray Wise be kick-ass as the Devil.

But by the season finale, the three friends–and the writers–had gotten over themselves.

Oh… let me say here… spoiler alert! Don’t read further if you don’t want to know what happens in the last episode of the season.

Not that the evolution happened all at once. Throughout the show, Sock and Ben have gotten all up in the reaping, often risking their lives to capture demons. Once the guys moved in together (about halfway through the year), their destinies got permanently intermingled.

Personally, I think that’s why there are no more jokes about how weird it is for the guys to be close. They are literally courting death, and they’ve even joined forces with rebel demons to overthrow Satan Himself. That’s heavy.

But not too heavy. Reaper is a comedy, so it never goes to that cheesy, Spielberg-Hanksy place where the brotherhood of the battlefield allows men to cry and love and be noble. In a fantastic tonal balance, the show doesn’t force the trio to be macho heroes, and it doesn’t ask them to be clueless losers. Instead, it walks between the two archetypes, producing characters who are essentially normal people in unusual circumstances.

So now, they just really care about each other and don’t feel the need to comment on it. They don’t have time to be ironic about their affection, because there’s evil to overthrow.

And really, how many other sincere, intimate male friendships exist on television right now? And on a comedy, no less? The honest love between Sam, Sock, and Ben keeps me invested in their exploits.

It has also allowed for some damn fine writing. In the finale, Sock gets superhuman strength by kissing a sexy Succubus (naturally). Meanwhile,  Sam is trying to capture an escaped demon, so the demon puts a curse on him that hangs him from an invisible noose. The solution? Sock, with his temporary strength, carries Sam on his shoulders, which pops Sam’s head out of the rope.

Running like that, the fellas chase the fleeing demon down the street, until Sock hurls a magical baseball hundreds of yards. The baseball is a Vessel, which captures the demon and releases Sam from his curse.

(Um… okay. If you haven’t watched this show, I know how crazy that sounds. Magic baseball? Is this Angels in the Outfield? But trust me… it makes sense in context. Basically.)

The entire metaphor of that scene is that these guys have formed a vital bond. Sock literally supports his friend, and he even slays one of his demons for him. In other words, your friends can boost you through terrible times, if you just allow them to see that you’re hurting.

Sock’s strength comes with a drawback–a few hours after the rush, he crashes hard–but Sam and Ben are there to take care of him.

If you think about it, this is exactly the message of Sex and the City. In both cases, friends help each other through everything.

And just like almost every episode of S&TC , Reaper ends with the central group of friends gathered alone. In this case, the boys burn an effigy of a Sam’s supposedly-dead father. (Again. Context.) Sock says he doesn’t know how to make Sam feel better, but he does know how to blow stuff up, so that’s what they’ll do.

But it’s clear that Sock does make Sam feel better, just by being around. Same for Ben. Same for Miranda, when she walks behind Charlotte all the way home from her ob/gyn appointment.

And just like S&TC, Reaper makes it clear that romance is important, but not more important than friendships. Before heading to the effigy, Sam tells his girlfriend Andi (Missy Peregrym) that he needs time alone with the guys. But the scene is written so that he’s not simply brushing off his clingy woman to go slam some Pabst and watch Skinemax. He obviously respects her, and she obviously gets it.

That’s the other, crucial dimension of the male relationships on this show: They don’t gain strength by belittling women. Maybe it’s because Reaper‘s co-creators are women (Michele Fazekas and Tara Butters), but whatever the reason, all of the major female characters have been given complicated journeys. Even Sam’s mom, barely present this season, is set up in the final scene of the year to be wildly powerful and interesting. (Why is she digging up Dad’s corpse? Why isn’t Dad really dead? Oooh!)

With all that happening, I cannot be in child pose while Reaper is on. I’m excited to give it everything I’ve got.