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With the Netflix hit Dead to Me, creator Liz Feldman developed a potent method for addictive tv. Equal elements black comedy, madcap crime drama, and the bubbliest of cleaning soap operas, the present solid Linda Cardellini as an agent of chaos propelled into the lifetime of an unsuspecting household. Each half-hour episode provided sufficient twists to offer you whiplash—and to maintain you bingeing. It was, in some ways, the best streaming present. So it is sensible that Feldman and Netflix would wish to replicate its success together with her subsequent mission for the platform.
No Good Deed, whose eight-episode first season is streaming in full as of Dec. 12, was clearly constructed from the Dead to Me template—all the way down to its title, one other cliché-derived phrase of three monosyllabic phrases. It has darkish humor, it has crime, it offers each character at the very least one damning secret, it ends every temporary installment with a stack of shocker reveals. It even has Cardellini, taking part in one other artful wildcard. Yet the stability Dead to Me struck was fragile; if the plot may get cartoonish, then the connection between the 2 leads, Cardellini and Christina Applegate, and the plausibility of their characters’ bond helped droop disbelief. No Good Deed has no such drive to mitigate the glib jokes and exhausting, seemingly random left turns. It was pure skilled obligation, not enjoyment and even curiosity, that stored me watching previous the premiere.
Set, like Dead to Me, amongst upper-middle-class denizens of Southern California, the sequence facilities on an abiding obsession of that milieu: actual property. Empty nesters Paul (Ray Romano) and Lydia (Lisa Kudrow) have determined to promote the beautiful Spanish-style dwelling in Los Feliz the place Paul grew up and the couple, in flip, raised their very own two children. They want cash, partly as a result of Lydia, a famend pianist, has discovered herself unable to play for the previous a number of years. Something traumatic appears to have occurred in the home. While Lydia wallows within the residual ache, Paul has clammed up. Their incompatible coping mechanisms are straining the wedding.
No Good Deed begins with an open home that serves the aim of introducing the remainder of its ensemble solid, as Paul and Lydia spy on the occasion through smartphone surveillance. Dennis (O-T Fagbenle) and Carla (Teyonah Parris) are creative-class newlyweds with a child on the best way. His pushy mom, Denise (Anna Maria Horsford), has agreed to assist them purchase the costly dwelling so long as she—Carla’s nightmare roommate—will get to maneuver in, too. A pair that has been crushing on the villa for years, Leslie (Abbi Jacobson) and Sarah (Poppy Liu), has been at odds, after a heartbreaking first try, over whether or not Sarah ought to maintain attempting to get pregnant. A dopey, washed-up cleaning soap opera star, JD (Luke Wilson), arrives flimsily disguised. Paul and Lydia’s actual property agent (Matt Rogers) acknowledges Cardellini’s designer-draped Margo as an area “lookie Louise”; the much less tactful Lydia calls her an “AI-generated bitch.” Then there’s Mikey (Denis Leary), a tough ex-con who is aware of one thing the owners are determined to cover.
The listing of dramatis personae is just too lengthy. Dead to Me bought off to a compelling begin due to its tight give attention to Applegate’s seething widow character, Jen; Cardellini’s dreamy, eccentric, secret-harboring Judy; and the electrical energy of the interdependent friendship that kinds so shortly between these two lonely girls. No Good Deed is simply too busy hopping from faction to faction, because it litters every storyline with lies and twists, to flesh out so many characters. Despite just a few enjoyable performances (Rogers nails his crazy one-liners) from a solid of charming comedy veterans, it’s unattainable to get invested within the fates of individuals we solely know as pawns in Feldman’s messy chess sport. A season-long sequence of flashbacks to a fateful night time in the home feels cheaper with every episode. Certain detours—a cocaine caper, as an illustration—stretch the characters’ personalities to this point past recognition that you just begin to imagine anybody may do something at any second.
This inconsistency may be not simply irritating however downright alienating, particularly with regards to what ought to be the present’s most sympathetic ingredient: Paul, Lydia, and their troubled marriage. While the concept of fixing up two of the previous three many years’ most interesting sitcom stars sounds nice, there’s little within the script that implies why the individuals Romano and Kudrow play belong collectively, and that emotional void manifests on display as a scarcity of chemistry. As absurd as its soapy machinations may turn out to be, Dead to Me turned out to be a genuinely shifting story of two platonic soulmates’ unconditional love for each other. No Good Deed is, I believe, attempting to spin its personal overcrowded story right into a meditation on household, grief, and shifting on. Unfortunately, any theme Feldman tries to hold on these slippery characters simply slides off into inanity.
