Dont Fear The Reaper / Live-Action TV

• Guardian: The Lonely and Great God: Wang Yeo is a Grim Reaper (instead of just one Death there are lots of them in the series) and starts out indifferent to humans but not antagonistic towards them. He becomes a lot warmer once he befriends Eun-tak and falls in love with Sunny.
• Grimm: Gevatter Tod are assassin bug Wesen who use their saliva to peacefully euthanize senile Wesen who pose a threat to society (and the Masquerade) with uncontrolled woging and violent behavior. They only do it with the consent of their victims' families, are very respectful and solemn, and have never forced the Grimms to go after them.
• The Japanese live-action drama Shinigami-kun based on the manga of the same name is portrayed as someone who can pass for human, albeit a human with a rather odd taste in clothes. He frequently shows up to congratulate the soon-to-be-dearly-departed on their impending demise, and tell them that they have three days left to live and to tie up and loose ends. He's also baffled and often rather hurt that - with one exception - none of the people he mentions this to are all that happy about the heads up.
• The Twilight Zone (1959):
  • "Nothing in the Dark". A woman frightened of dying allows a wounded police officer (played by a young Robert Redford) into her apartment. When she realizes that he's Death come to claim her, he tries to convince her that she shouldn't fear death.
    Mother, give me your hand... You see. No shock. No engulfment. No tearing asunder. What you feared would come like an explosion is like a whisper. What you thought was the end is the beginning. — Death, assuring the old woman that her journey has just begun.
    ...
    Am I really that frightening? Before you knew who I was, you sat with me. Talked with me.
  • With one or two exceptions, Death is regularly portrayed as a very polite man — often a businessman wearing a nice suit. Which, when you think about it, is probably a good thing since his job is to "welcome" people into death, not to make them run away from it.
  • One character, Mr. Bookman, gets to make a deal to extend his life to finish his life's ambition, to make "a pitch for the angels". Death agrees but is annoyed when Bookman decides to retire and says he'll take a life of a little girl instead, flinging Bookman's loophole back in his face when he tries to break the deal himself. This leads Bookman to make a pitch to Death of a collection of worthless trinkets (ties, threads and matches) in order to make Death miss his appointment with the girl, thus completing his life's ambition of a big sale that made a difference. Either Death set the whole thing up just to make his client feel better or you can trick him by selling him cheap shoe polish; either way no need to fear him.
    Bookman: Oh, excuse me, I forgot something. I'll be back in a minute. [gathers up his box full of merchandise] You never know who might need something, up there... [hopefully] Up there?
    Death: Up there, Mr. Bookman. You made it.
• The Twilight Zone (1985) revival featured an episode where Death was cold and emotionally distant, but not evil or malicious. He regards a woman who has become fascinated with him with curiosity, but never animosity; eventually, he allows her to become his partner and she embodies the trope more closely by helping to comfort the dying as they are taken.
• In The Twilight Zone (2002) revival, the episode "A Night In Mercy", Death is a kind man who doesn't like his job at all and admires a doctor for having the power to give life. Death decides to give up his job, and the doctor quickly finds out how vital it is when incurable burn patients are unable to die and are thus left in agony. When the doctor dies at the end of the episode, Death admits that he's tempted to let him go back to life, but both of them agree that it's just the way things go.
• Touched by an Angel has Andrew, who's a cheerful, friendly, and attractive 30-ish man. His predecessor Adam (not that Adam... probably) was also a pretty nice guy.
• Played with in Dead Like Me: the reapers are all former semi-normal people, and are often quite friendly and reassuring, but are also likely to steal from the newly dead and basically behave like people in a customer service job they're not being paid to do.
• Supernatural:
  • Tessa, one of the Reapers. Admittedly, some of the other Reapers we see range from creepy to outright scary, but Tessa appears to spirits as a gorgeous, compassionate, and genuinely sweet servant of Death, and Sam and Dean even willingly save her from meeting a grisly fate in season four. Though during her role there, she's a bit more snippy than in her first appearance, mostly dismissing the brothers when they try to help a dead young boy who has yet to pass on. The reason being, for the latter, was that she was supposed to take Dean, until he was brought back to life by Azazel, thanks to his dad making a deal.
  • Death himself, the boss of the Reapers, also appears. Death is a Cosmic Entity who is as old as the universe and about the same age as God. He runs on Blue-and-Orange Morality and has seen the death of entire galaxies and will eventually reap God! Hence, he is extremely pissed off that he is bound to one tiny planet circling around a barely newborn sun in a young galaxy that usually wouldn't even be a blip on his radar, due to "a spoilt brat having a tantrum" (a.k.a Lucifer). Dean has a little problem swallowing his pizza after being told this. Just a gentle reminder that, no matter how much of a threat Lucifer may seem, there is Always a Bigger Fish. A much bigger fish. This Death is also given a very human trait, one he shares with Dean: he really likes cheap but tasty food such as pizza, bacon dogs, and fried pickles.
  • In a later episode Dean wants Death's help to restore Sam's soul and Death gives him a test where Dean has to do Death's duties for a day. Dean fails the test but attempts to fix his mistake as much as he can. Death is impressed that Dean was able to understand the seriousness and importance of Death's job and gives Sam his soul back.
  • When the Winchesters deal with Death he's usually quite snarky and dispassionate because he feels they're wasting his time by asking him for favors. However, when he's reaping someone he appears quite polite and complimentary and finds it an honor to guide specific people to the afterlife.
• Death is a recurring character in the older BBC series Mulberry, which is appropriate given that the titular character Mulberry is his own son, tasked with cheering up a dour old woman before Death comes to call on business. He spends a good deal of his appearances arguing with Mulberry about how his job isn't a bad thing and how he'd like it if Mulberry would stop asking for extensions on the time he's got.
• Married... with Children: After years of begging for Death, Al Bundy gets his wish. Good news: Death offers Al a way out. Bad news: Death can assume any appearance, so naturally it chose his wife Peggy. (And is quite a Deadpan Snarker to boot.)
• Weirdly enough, there is an NCIS episode that implicitly features the Angel of Death. She appears as a little girl, and mostly just appears to be dropping in to check on her next cases.
• A Rowan Atkinson sketch titled "The Devil's Welcome" plays with this hilariously.
  The Devil: Now, you're all here for..... Eternity! Ooh, which I hardly need tell you is a heck of a long time, so you'll all get to know each other pretty well by the end.
  But for now I'm going to have to split you up in groups.
  Will You Stop Screaming!
• Mysterious Ways: Declan starts worrying that his teaching assistant, a not at all scary looking young woman, is the Angel of Death and she has come for him. Throughout the course of the episode, and in dealing with his own potential illness, it is revealed that she is actually the Angel of Comfort (the same one who visited him when his dad died.) The Angel of Death does not appear.
• Several Angels of Death appear in Charmed, one in the form of a friendly black janitor, and the other in the form of a wise, insightful (but very, very snarky) British guy. His first appearance goes out of its way to preach that he is not an evil entity - and other appearances have Balancing Death's Books as a plot point. Piper even gets to be the Angel of Death and help people transition to death.
• Death as portrayed in Horrible Histories is a hot-blooded, chummy Cloud Cuckoo Lander who looks quite intimidating and has a very mocking sense of humour (his raison d'etre is to laugh at tales of people who die in stupid ways, to So Unfunny, It's Funny levels) but is otherwise a really Nice Guy. The worst he'll do is make a terrible pun about the way you died, laugh at you insultingly for a while, and then let you into the Afterlife. He also sings songs.
• American Horror Story: Asylum has Shachath, an angel of death. She uses her Kiss of Death to release people from pain and suffering. Her encounter with Sister Mary Eunice makes it quite clear that the two oppose each other.
• Oddly played with in Sabrina the Teenage Witch where The Grim Reaper is Sabrina's aunt - it's a community service, randomly assigned, in a similar manner to jury duty, in the witch world. As explained when Sabrina manages to stop screaming, what the job actually entails is delivering bad news, which may be about anything, from death to a handling fee being applied on top of your accountants' fees to be deducted from your tax return. Bad news is best delivered by a cloaked figure with a scythe, for some reason.
• The Grim Reaper is a guest on The Sifl and Olly Show in one episode. As it turns out, he's from Montreal, he's a Gemini, and he's into R & B music. Sifl and Olly even sing the Trope Namer song at the end of the show. He reappears during an infomercial for the Precious Roy Luxury Coffin to point out that he doesn't kill people, he just takes their souls to the afterlife after they die, after which the body just rots.
• Lucifer (2016): Azrael is the famed Angel of Death, whose blade destroys whoever it stabs in their entirety. We finally meet Azrael in "Boo, Normal" and turns out she is a nerdy, bespectacled dork who goes by "Rae-Rae" and has been pretending to be Ella's imaginary friend for years. She spends most of the fifth season sitting out the conflict between her siblings as death is neutral. She shows up in the season finale and apologises to Lucifer as she's only there to reap Chloe, something she obviously doesn't want to do.
• Guiding Light. When a character is hospitalized after being shot, he notices strange flashes of light around one of his nurses and mentions it to her. Suddenly, he becomes very fearful upon realizing who/what she really is and she gently reassures him, "Don't be scared."
• Xena: Warrior Princess: Celesta takes the role of taking the life out of those whose time has come. Despite floating eerily, she is fairly friendly and is even willing to let a few mortals leave peacefully.
• Moon Knight has Tawret, the Egyptian god of birth and fertility, who also serves the purpose of escorting souls to the afterlife^note Anubis, the actual psychopomp from Egyptian Mythology, has been imprisoned, hence why she's doing his job. While intimidating in appearance, resembling a humanoid hippopotamus, she turns out to be very friendly. She patiently explains what's going on to the protagonist, balances his moral scale fairly, says that she hopes he makes it to the good afterlife, and (eventually) even tries to help him avert his fate, especially upon witnessing unbalanced souls being condemned before their time. However she's also pretty flippant about condemning souls who fail the test to a Fate Worse than Death (so long as their time has come), so there's that.
• The Sandman (2022) shows Death much as she was in the original Gaiman stories as an All-Loving Hero who prides herself on being a kind, understanding face ready to meet each human as they pass and guide them to their afterlife.

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