Here’s officially all you need to know about “Reaper” to be sold on it: on his 21st birthday, Sam (Bret Harrison) discovers that, before he was born, his parents sold his soul to The Devil…and when The Devil turns up to let Sam in on what that whole soul-selling thing means to him, we discover that he’s played by – wait for it – Ray Wise.

Ray Wise, as you may or may not know, played Leland Palmer – Laura Palmer’s father – on “Twin Peaks,” and, believe you me, there ain’t nobody who can do a devilish smile like that man.

Executive producer Deborah Spera says, “We looked high and low for the right Devil, I have to say. And we had spent a lot of time looking at many actors and their portrayal of the devil. And (executive producer) Tom Spezialy came in and said, ‘You know what I was thinking about? What about Ray Wise?’ And we were like, ‘Oh, my God, perfect.’ Ray walked in and smiled at us, and that was it.”

At this point, Tyler Labine (“Invasion”), one of the stars of “Reaper,” said, “Just grin, Ray, right now.”

So he did.

After the applause died down, executive producer Michelle Fazekas added, “He read for us, and, literally, we were, like, ‘We’re there.'”

So are we.

For his part, Wise kinda sorta did research his entire life for this part. When asked what preparation he did to play The Devil, he replied, “Oh, I guess 37 years of acting and about 400 movies that I’ve seen in the last 10 or 12 or 15 years, watching John Huston in ‘The Devil and Daniel Webster,’ people like Peter Stormare in ‘Constantine.’ I’ve seen devils like Peter Cook in ‘Bedazzled,’ pretty much remembering every devil that’s ever been done on the screen, big and small, then forgetting all about that and doing my devil, which is a combination of probably me and every other character I’ve ever played from Caligula Caesar, the mad emperor of Rome, to Leland Palmer, to a variety of villainous and terrible people. But I play a lot of good people, too, and so I can inject some of that into the devil, too.

“In fact, I ran into David Strathairn this morning on an airplane flight here. David and I did ‘Good Night & Good Luck’ together. And he said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m playing The Devil in ‘Reaper,’ a new TV show.’ And he said, ‘You are playing The Devil?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ ‘You mean The Devil is a good guy?’ He knows me only from ‘Good Night & Good Luck,’ really, you know, and he doesn’t know a lot of the other things I’ve done in the past, so, to him, The Devil would be a good guy…but he could also be perceived as a very bad guy. Personally, as The Devil, I don’t think he sees in terms of good or bad and black and white.”

However you see The Devil, there’s one think that’s for certain: “Reaper” is a great, funny show. It plays like a guys’ version of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” on a lot of levels. You’ve got a reluctant hero with a destiny he can’t escape from (instead of slaying vampires, he’s capturing the souls that have escaped from Hell), he’s got a best bud who helps him out, he’s got his own version of the Scooby Gang, and if he doesn’t exactly have the equivalent of a Giles in The Devil, at least he’s got a elder (to say the least) to bounce things off of.

Plus, the pilot’s directed by Kevin Smith! What more do you need?