No Good Deed Feels Like Punishment
With the Netflix hit Dead to Me, creator Liz Feldman developed a potent formula for addictive television. Equal parts black comedy, madcap crime drama, and the bubbliest of soap operas, the show cast Linda Cardellini as an agent of chaos propelled into the life of an unsuspecting family. Each half-hour episode offered enough twists to give you whiplash—and to keep you bingeing. It was, in many ways, the ideal streaming show. So it makes sense that Feldman and Netflix would want to replicate its success with her next project for the platform.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]No Good Deed, whose eight-episode first season is streaming in full as of Dec. 12, was clearly built from the Dead to Me template—down to its title, another cliché-derived phrase of three monosyllabic words. It has dark humor, it has crime, it gives every character at least one damning secret, it ends each brief installment with a stack of shocker reveals. It even has Cardellini, playing another crafty wildcard. Yet the balance Dead to Me struck was fragile; if the plot could get cartoonish, then the connection between the two leads, Cardellini and Christina Applegate, and the plausibility of their characters’ bond helped suspend disbelief. No Good Deed has no such force to mitigate the glib jokes and exhausting, seemingly random left turns. It was pure professional obligation, not enjoyment or even curiosity, that kept me watching past the premiere.
Set, like Dead to Me, among upper-middle-class denizens of Southern California, the series centers on an abiding obsession of that milieu: real estate. Empty nesters Paul (Ray Romano) and Lydia (Lisa Kudrow) have decided to sell the lovely Spanish-style home in Los Feliz where Paul grew up and the couple, in turn, raised their own two kids. They need money, in part because Lydia, a renowned pianist, has found herself unable to play for the past several years. Something traumatic seems to have happened in the house. While Lydia wallows in the residual pain, Paul has clammed up. Their incompatible coping mechanisms are straining the marriage.
No Good Deed begins with an open house that serves the purpose of introducing the rest of its ensemble cast, as Paul and Lydia spy on the event via smartphone surveillance. Dennis (O-T Fagbenle) and Carla (Teyonah Parris) are creative-class newlyweds with a baby on the way. His pushy mother, Denise (Anna Maria Horsford), has agreed to help them buy the expensive home as long as she—Carla’s nightmare roommate—gets to move in, too. A couple that has been crushing on the villa for years, Leslie (Abbi Jacobson) and Sarah (Poppy Liu), has been at odds, after a heartbreaking first attempt, over whether Sarah should keep trying to get pregnant. A dopey, washed-up soap opera star, JD (Luke Wilson), arrives flimsily disguised. Paul and Lydia’s real estate agent (Matt Rogers) recognizes Cardellini’s designer-draped Margo as a local “lookie Louise”; the less tactful Lydia calls her an “AI-generated bitch.” Then there’s Mikey (Denis Leary), a rough ex-con who knows something the homeowners are desperate to hide.
The list of dramatis personae is simply too long. Dead to Me got off to a compelling start thanks to its tight focus on Applegate’s seething widow character, Jen; Cardellini’s dreamy, eccentric, secret-harboring Judy; and the electricity of the interdependent friendship that forms so quickly between these two lonely women. No Good Deed is too busy hopping from faction to faction, as it litters each storyline with lies and twists, to flesh out so many characters. Despite a few fun performances (Rogers nails his loopy one-liners) from a cast of charming comedy veterans, it’s impossible to get invested in the fates of people we only know as pawns in Feldman’s messy chess game. A season-long series of flashbacks to a fateful night in the house feels cheaper with each episode. Certain detours—a cocaine caper, for instance—stretch the characters’ personalities so far beyond recognition that you start to believe anyone could do anything at any moment.
This inconsistency can be not just frustrating but downright alienating, especially when it comes to what should be the show’s most sympathetic element: Paul, Lydia, and their troubled marriage. While the idea of fixing up two of the past three decades’ most appealing sitcom stars sounds great, there’s little in the script that suggests why the people Romano and Kudrow play belong together, and that emotional void manifests on screen as a lack of chemistry. As absurd as its soapy machinations could become, Dead to Me turned out to be a genuinely moving tale of two platonic soulmates’ unconditional love for one another. No Good Deed is, I think, trying to spin its own overcrowded story into a meditation on family, grief, and moving on. Unfortunately, any theme Feldman tries to hang on these slippery characters just slides off into inanity.