Liz Feldman’s previous Netflix dramedy, Dead To Me, was a fun two-hander starring Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini as suburban women caught up in an unlikely murder plot. Feldman returns to the same milieu of the LA burbs with No Good Deed (Netflix, from Thursday), but this moribund dark comedy is, alas, a bit of a pre-Christmas turkey with all the charm of a plate of overcooked Brussels sprouts.
Cardellini is back, this time playing a bored, over-sexed housewife who covets her neighbours’ huge mansion across the street in the desirable neighbourhood of Los Feliz (South Dublin with better weather and less grating American accents). As luck would have it, the house is on the market – though its owners, Paul (Ray Romano) and Lydia (Lisa Kudrow), are conflicted about selling up.
That’s because a violent tragedy occurred in the building three years previous, from which neither are ready to move on. They have other problems – most pressingly, an estranged college-going daughter and Paul’s criminal brother (Denis Leary). He is fresh out of prison and eager to blackmail his sibling about the terrible event that derailed Paul and Lydia’s lives. There is also the awkward matter of the firearm Paul keeps hidden – for reasons that become horrifically clear across the eight-episode season.
Romano and Kudrow are comedy veterans – Kudrow is obviously a star of Friends, while Romano fronted 1990s sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond. But for all their talent, they struggle with Feldman’s lemon-sucking story of a miserable middle-aged couple clinging to a shared sense of grievance against the world.
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Cardellini also does her best opposite Luke Wilson as her wooden soap actor husband. They play Margo and JD – one of three couples desperately seeking Paul and Lydia’s house in a series that plays out like the grimmest ever season of Location, Location, Location. Up against them are Leslie (Abbi Jacobson) and Sarah (Poppy Liu), whose attempts to conceive by IVF have spiralled off on an awkward tangent; and Carla (Teyonah Parris) and Dennis (O-T Fagbenle), plus Dennis’s overbearing mother, Denise (Anna Maria Horsford).
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Feldman’s depiction of privileged LA suburbia as a curtain-twitching hellscape is exhaustingly bleak, and it’s hard to see the funny side of a chuckle-fest that revolves around the death of a loved one. Dark comedies can be riveting – but the misery that courses through No Good Deed keeps the laughter at bay. It’s a sad show about desperate people sleepwalking through middle age. Here is a pre-Christmas surprise you’ll want to leave under the tree.
