TV Review: "No Good Deed"
Liz Feldman's newest Netflix offering is a dark comedy that, despite a somewhat sprawling narrative, manages to be both quite hilarious and frequently poignant.
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Warning: Full spoilers for the series follow.
The series Dead to Me was one of my favorite series of the past decade, thanks in part to the remarkable performances from both Christina Applegate and Linda Cardelliini, as well as its expert weaving together of its tragic and hilarious elements. Now, series creator Liz Feldman is back with No Good Deed, which hits many of the same notes as its predecessor. There’s the issue of grief, lots of narrative twists and turns and changes of fortune as the various characters try to outmaneuver each other and grapple with their pasts, presents, and futures.
When the series begins, married couple Paul and Lydia Morgan (Ray Romano and Lisa Kudrow) have put their house up for sale. It’s a beautiful home, so it’s not surprising that they are inundated with several different families, each of whom view the house as their holy grail. Of particular note are three different families: lesbian couple Leslie and Sarah (Abbi Jacobson and Poppy Liu); newly married couple Dennis and Carla and Dennis’s meddling mother, Denise (O-T Fagbenle, Teyonah Parris, and Anna Maria Horsford); and faded soap opera star JD Campbell and his philandering wife Margo (Luke Wilson and Linda Cardellini). Things get even more complicated with the arrival of Paul’s ex-con brother, Mikey, who bears the couple a lot of ill-will and demands money. Looming over it all is the specter of their son’s death, which happened several years ago.
No Good Deed is, as other reviewers have pointed out, a bit jam-packed when it comes to its plot, with quite a few changes of fortune as the various protagonists contend with challenges both in the present and the past. Each set of characters has their own challenges to overcome. Leslie and Sarah have to decide whether they want a baby; Dennis and Carla have to contend with the rushed nature of their marriage, a soon-to-be-born baby, and a nosy mother with secrets of her own; and JD and Margo have no shortage of marital and financial difficulties. All this while Paul and Lydia grapple with their grief and the return of the former’s brother, ex-con Mikey, who is violent and unpredictable. This is a lot of balls to keep in the air and, while the series doesn’t always pull it off, it nevertheless keeps you hooked.
Where this series really excels, however, is in its performances. Like many other millennials I’ve been a little in love with Lisa Kudrow ever since she gave such hilarious and poignant performances in everything from Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion to Friends. Here she perfectly slides into the persona of a mother grieving the loss of her son, her sorrow and guilt so great that she can no longer pursue her art as a concert pianist. Some of the most poignant moments are those in which she recalls past moments with both of her children, both her son who died on that fateful night a few years earlier and her daughter, from whom she is estranged. You can feel the pain and anguish of a mother who has lost her son, a fate that no parent should have to endure, and there’s something even more wrenching about the fact that she still calls his cell, both so she can hear his voice and so she can leave him messages.
Kudrow’s grieving energy is matched by Ray Romano, who is in his element as Paul. While he too carries around the tremendous weight of grief, he hasn’t allowed it to consume his life as much as his wife has done. Romano has made quite a career out of playing beleaguered and somewhat hapless husbands–most notably, of course, in Everyone Loves Raymond–but what makes this performance extraordinary is just how much emotional depth he brings. There’s a haunted depth to his eyes that pulls at your heart, and he perfectly captures the plight of a man who has lost his son and feels his relationship with his wife slipping through his fingers, all of this made even more difficult by the circumstances of the former’s death.
Linda Cardellini is no slouch either when it comes to the performances she delivers as Margo. Margo is rapacious and cunning, quite willing and capable of manipulating others for her own gain and ruthlessly destroying anyone who threatens her own happiness. Even though she’s arguably the most reprehensible character in this entire series, there’s still a lot more going on with her than one might assume at first. One gets the sense that, beneath all of the malice and the manipulation, there’s a frightened little girl who has never really forgiven herself for the damage her negligence inflicted on her younger brother (she left a space heater running, which set a fire, which left him permanently scarred). And, while she ends up lashing out at her lesbian lover after the latter rejects her, it’s clear that here, too, her desire is for a form of connection that has largely eluded her throughout her life. It’s to Cardellini’s credit that she manages to imbue this character with so much depth. If the series gets a second season, I do hope that we get to see more of her.
The supporting cast are also uniformly excellent, though the sprawling number of characters, combined with the limited number of episodes, often means that we don’t get as much time with them as we might like. This seems to be an ongoing issue with Netflix, which must have a mandate that dictates that each show has to be stripped down to the bare bones, no matter how much damage this might do to the show in question. Even so, the series is remarkably deft at showing the power of grief to destroy a family from within, and there are enough mysteries to keep you guessing right up until the end. The big reveal–that daughter Emily did not in fact, shoot her brother thinking he was an intruder but that he was instead shot by a vengeful Margo–hits like a punch in the gut, even if it does also pave the way for the Morgan family to stitch itself back together.
Overall, I found myself quite taken with this series. While I don’t think it’s quite as tightly written as Dead to Me, it nevertheless kept me interested and invested in these characters and their lives. What’s more, it actually managed to tie things up at the end, with all of its major plotlines and subplots largely resolved in a way that felt authentic and true to what we’d already encountered. That’s no small thing these days, and all I can say is thank goodness for Liz Feldman.