2 out of 5

covers season 1

Following up on previous Netflix entry Dead to Me, No Good Deed creator Liz Feldman has perhaps settled into a comfort zone: bickering, unlikeable people who are tied together through a narratively-obscured story, and with Linda Cardellini as her muse. While there’s nuance to those structural elements, and we can always use more Cardellini, there’s an overall reliance on quirk to sail us through a loosey-goosey plot, and No Good Deed – even while smartly having a shorter overall season runtime versus Dead to Me – shows the weakness of this comfort zone formula quite immediately.

Married couple Lydia and Paul Morgan (Lisa Kudrow and Ray Romano, respectively) are our lead bickerers. TV shorthand communicates that they are a duo who’s relationship has been cracked by tragedy – the loss of a son. In the process of selling their house – or trying to, as Lydia tends to stymie the deal, more emotionally connected to the home and its ties to their son versus the tight-lipped Paul – we are introduced to a fuller cast of bickerers as potential buyers, including mama’s boy Dennis Sampson (O-T Fagbenle), nosy prosecutor Leslie (Abbi Jacobson), and failed TV star JD (Luke Wilson), and his wife, Margo (Linda Cardellini). All of these characters are quirk city, and all are variants of Dead to Me takes: they’re crass, they say a line with enough snark to indicate it’s a punchline, and / or they’re dunderheads, though we’re missing a wholly innocent dunderhead to moderate things, which was somewhat key to DtM’s tentative balancing.

To me, this is Feldman’s way of indicating how messy real life is: everyone is a little bad, a little mischievous, but also sometimes hopefully well-intentioned (except when they’re not, for the sake of TV). Conceptually I like this, but the writing tends to stray too far in to “TV characters – they’re just as obnoxious as us!” to really get on board with their plights, especially when that template is applied to everyone. That’s really the show’s downfall: you can kinda sorta get on board with Lydia or Paul or etc., with Lydia probably being the most sympathetic, but attempts at humor often just feel ill-timed – and not purposefully – or truly just not funny at all, doing the as-mentioned shtick of saying something with a beat for a rimshot that suggests it’s a joke, when actual processing of the language would prove otherwise. The microcosm example of this is the opening credits, and attempted cliffhanger endings: like a lot of streaming shows, this doesn’t necessarily seem to have been shot for an episodic format through-and-through, or at least without the consideration of openings and closings, leaving the editors to find points to insert the former and latter. So each episode starts with what’s edited into a zinger before dropping to the credits, and these are such unnoteworthy beats as to be truly puzzling. Similarly, while we get some appropriate cliffhangers, some episodes just end on… nothing. A simple statement that the black screen that follows attempts to make into something more.

Going back to character, with much of the humor minused out – even accepting that’s subjective – the situational black humor / story of No Good Deed is incredibly forced, requiring any given character to make dumb decisions or say dumb things, further dropping their likeability, or our ability to accept the swing of the show’s loose plotting, which involves some unspoken cover-up involving the Morgan’s son, and Paul’s brother – played by Denis Leary – showing up to extort the Morgans over that cover-up, while all of the potential house buyers have their own “mysteries” going on on the sidelines, and Cardellini vamping through every scene. Questionable subplots and extraneous characters are bread and butter for a lot of media, but the magic trick is making us ignore the lack of necessity; this is where the show fumbles moreso than its peers, as it relies on the cast to smooth over everything, but can hardly be bothered to justify the rest beyond the smallest efforts.

Which means: yes, the cast is the reason to watch this. I’m loving modern day Romano’s combination of his curmudgeon with pathos, and it’s interesting seeing Kudrow’s persona mapped to a similar equation. Fagbenle gets one of the more pointless slots in the show, but he’s always a joy, and while Cardellini / Feldman are clearly just having fun with the role of Margo… I mean, it is fun. Furthermore, buried under pointless twists and turns (which really amount to just withholding information for the entirety of the series), there is the core story of loss, which is given weight in the few moments that Romano and Kudrow are able to speak / act to it.

Boiled down to a film, this could all work, or at least better. Seeing that it’s cracked Netflix’s top viewing rankings, though, and that there’s a hook for another season, perhaps Feldman and crew will get another 8-10 episodes to try the formula out again. …And I’ll likely be there, grumbling but watching.