In “Not Yet Dead,” a perfectly pleasant, somewhat nonsensical, attractively peopled supernatural sitcom premiering Wednesday on ABC, Gina Rodriguez (“Jane the Virgin”) plays Nell, who after five years in London and a bad breakup returns to Southern California and a new job at her old newspaper, the fictional SoCal Independent. Once an investigative reporter, she’s put in charge of obituaries, to her initial chagrin.
As Nell is preparing her first assignment, Monty (played by Martin Mull) appears next to her on a bar stool, and before long it transpires that he is the dead person she is set to write about — famous as a writer of jingles but disappointed as an artist.
Thus begins a pattern: Each week there will be a guest star, or ghost star, with whom Nell will interact more or less normally (with the requisite “talking to someone no one else can see” jokes) as she learns a lesson and/or the the guest does; once the story is filed, the ghost goes on to wherever dead people go in this scenario.
