SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers from the first season of “No Good Deed,” now streaming on Netflix.
In Netflix’s “No Good Deed,” home is where the homicide was, and yet that still didn’t deter the buyers of the house on Derby Drive.
In the season finale of “Dead to Me” creator Liz Feldman’s new series, parents-to-be Sarah (Poppu Liu) and Leslie (Abbi Jacobson) saw their bid for the Los Feliz home accepted by sellers Lydia (Lisa Kudrow) and Paul (Ray Romano). But the agreement came only after Leslie’s intrusive lawyer instincts kicked in and unintentionally helped Lydia and Paul discover the truth behind their son’s death. The secret they had been keeping all season — they thought their daughter Emily (Chloe East) had accidentally shot and killed her brother Jacob (Wyatt Aubrey), thinking he was a burglar — wasn’t what really happened. The fatal shot actually came from Margo (Linda Cardellini), the Morgans’ ruthless neighbor who was having an affair with teen-aged Jacob, one that he threatened to expose after she called it off.
On that tragic night, Margo found Jacob dressed in full-burglar drag, complete with the ill-fitting ski mask, in her bedroom stealing back all the stolen jewelry he had given her. But not one to give up a gift, especially an expensive one, Margo chased him back to his house demanding he stay quiet about their affair. When he didn’t comply, she shot him. It just so happened that her bullet reached him before the one fired by Emily, who just thought someone was breaking into their house.
The truth absolves Emily and lets her parents breathe a sigh of relief about that night, which had been tearing them apart from grief. Yes, their son Jacob died that night, but learning that Emily hadn’t killed him is what allows them finally to begin healing. It also gave them the motivation to move on and sell to Sarah and Leslie, even though they are not originally who Feldman says she planned to give the house to in the end. The original winners were actually the first people viewers see scoping out the house in the series.
“There is a very quick little cameo in the pilot by my dear friend Vanessa Bayer, and in my script I referred to them as the ‘bougie couple,’ Feldman tells Variety. “They are the couple that you aren’t rooting for. You get the sense they have probably seen a bunch of houses, and they don’t really get emotionally invested. So I thought originally it might be fun for the house to end up with the bougie family, as if to say that this is just a house and it is just an exchange of money in the end… So that’s why I cast Vanessa in that role, because we were going to bring it all full circle.”
But after months of building the story and working with the writers, the house on Derby Drive wasn’t just a house. Feldman says they came to see it as its own character, and it too deserved a happy ending. “In order to give the house that happy ending, we felt like giving it to Leslie and Sarah was allowing the house to sort of heal itself because they know exactly what happened there,” Feldman says. “They know the truth, and I think sometimes we think a house has a darkness to it because there was a death there. But in a way, once you know the truth about it and you appreciate the entire story, it brings it light again.”
The secrets weren’t confined to Paul and Lydia’s house. Margo’s increasingly shameful schemes to retain her posh life and fake identity –– we see you, country bumpkin Luann! — caught up with her in the end. After she beat herself up in a wild attempt to claim she was a battered spouse, her scorned actor husband JD (Luke Wilson) set their house on fire while she soaked in a bubble bath upstairs. She made it out, though, the ever-resilient survivor that she is. Feldman says the ending was too ridiculous to resist, given Margo’s stories of her brother’s unfortunate fire-related injuries. But beyond that ending, which finds half of Margo’s face badly burned like a certain Batman villain, Feldman didn’t want Margo to veer too far into moustache-twirling villain territory.
“Linda is such a brilliant actress, I didn’t want to cheapen the role by doing that,” she says. “And by the way, we say ‘moustache-twirling’ all the time in the writers’ room. That was our code for this has gone too far, and now we are in a Looney Tune.”
Feldman previously worked with Cardellini on her last series, “Dead To Me,” in which her character Judy was such a selfless person that it often got her into deep trouble. While filming one of Judy’s characteristically sincere scenes in Season 3, Feldman says Cardellini proclaimed she needed a change.
“We were in the middle of shooting a scene where Judy was probably doing something incredibly selfless and throwing herself in front of a train for someone, and Linda just said, ‘The next thing I do I just want to play a badass bitch,’” Feldman recalls. “I love Linda, and we have such a wonderful working relationship, so I thought maybe this badass bitch could exist in this world of Los Angeles real estate.”
But don’t call her a villain around Feldman. “I don’t like the term “villain,” even though there is a truth to the level of psychopathy that you find in certain people who live in Los Angeles, and it was really fun to be able to explore that, and dive in and see how low a person like that might be able to go.”
In the aftermath of the revelations, Paul and Lydia managed to find their way back to each other after spending the season repeatedly voicing their biting frustrations with how the other was grieving Jacob. In the final scene, they join Emily at one of her music sets, where she plays a song composed by Jacob with lyrics written by her — and Lydia is finally back to accompanying her on the piano.
“We felt that they needed that catharsis,” Feldman says. “They needed to speak their deepest, darkest, harshest truths to each other instead of constantly trying to protect the other person’s feelings, thereby dampening their own emotions and stuffing their own shit down. In wanting to give them as close to a happy ending as possible, we felt like we needed them to really confront the thing in the other person that was bothering them the most. The truth is that thing for them was the way the other one was grieving the loss of their son.”
But she cautions that while all may be forgiven between the Morgans, don’t expect them to forget. “If you were to ever see them again, that might come up,” she teases.
In talking with Feldman about the season, it’s clear that she has already put quite a bit of thought into the next chapter of this story, even though Netflix has not formally greenlit a second season. When asked about what kind of house Paul and Lydia end up in after the move, she goes with a similarly vague, “That is a really good question that I am not going to answer, because you never know what you might see in a Season 2.”
The same could be said about what lies ahead for Dennis (O-T Fagbenle) and Carla (Teyonah Parris), who decided not to buy the Morgans’ home and instead build a new house on the now-vacant lot once occupied by JD and Margo’s charred abode. With the arrival of their son, Dennis finishing his second book and him coming to terms with the news that his father was not his biological father, they seem to have settled into a comfortable zone. Except, that is, for Dennis secretly cashing the $5 million check from Carla’s billionaire dad to float their lifestyle. And now, daddy’s come calling.
“We become the things in our parents that we resent the most, and in a way it brings us closer to understanding them,” Feldman says. “You could see it as a bad thing, or you could see it as a way for Dennis to feel closer to his mother because now he has made the same mistake.”
The finale certainly sets everyone else up for splashy things to do in a potential Season 2. JD finally got cast in the kind of “Yellowstone”-adjacent project he felt he was so perfect for, only this one is called “Teton Territory” — and eagle-eyed viewers will recognize Feldman in a quick cameo as the series’ director. Paul’s brother Mikey (Denis Leary) reunited with his police officer son Nate (Kevin Alves), who happens to be the one arresting Margo in the season’s final moments. Even Greg the realtor (Matt Rogers) comes out smiling with an increasingly lucrative commission from the Morgans, and the nosy neighbor Phyllis (Linda Lavin, for whom Feldman specifically wrote the role) has plenty to gossip about with a slew of new neighbors.
“I’ll just say that I always had a Season 2 in mind, and I do think that a show like this has legs if it is done in a clever way,” Feldman says. “I’m very excited to sit down and talk to Netflix about what those plans are. They know a little bit, but I do think that this show has some life left to live, and I really hope that we get to see it through.”
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