1 week Ago By Daniel Fienberg
Halfway through Netflix’s , Lydia Morgan ( ), a former concert pianist now embroiled in the madness of trying to sell her house, reflects on a repetitively heightened situation, sighs and says, “I’m so sorry and I can’t believe this is happening again.” could have been a good title for ‘s , a murky comedy about female friendship and murder that managed to take a tenuously thin premise and elongate it over three seasons by virtue of wild and sometimes illogical pivots, plus the truly exceptional work from stars Christina Applegate and . It was an exhaustingly paced show and, by its series finale, it put you through an emotional ringer as well.
But if you had the patience for Feldman’s dogged approach, it was rewarding. That makes more appropriately titled . Although it attempts a relentlessness that makes look as leisurely as , the eight-episode series plays very much like a companion piece — one that reenforces a Liz Feldman brand in which gratuitously withheld secrets and jarringly abrupt twists are as much a piece of the comic rhythms as eye-gouging once was for the Three Stooges.
Like , is far too pleased with its own storytelling cleverness for its own good. When everything is meant to be shocking, it’s impossible for anything to be shocking. But also like , uses the dramatic underpinnings of its central situation to give juicy, emotionally varied material to a cast of actors making the most out of every predictably outrageous zig and zag.
Get past the contrivances, and the comedy has some perceptive observations about the way grief and secrets can color a relationship, plus some very trenchant commentary about the sorry state of the Los Angeles real estate market. Lydia is married to ‘s Paul, and they’re selling their 1920s Spanish-style house in Los Feliz. The abode, which doubled as Paul’s childhood home, was where they raised their own children, and it’s filled with memories both happy and very sad.
The property is listed with excitable realtor Greg (Matt Rogers), who dreams of a quick sale and a hefty commission. There’s a healthy market for it, composed entirely of couples harboring potentially relationship-crushing secrets. Leslie ( ) and Sarah ( ), an attorney and a doctor respectively, are looking for a place to expand their life together after several failed rounds of IVF.
Carla ( ) and Dennis ( ) have known each other for only a year but are suddenly married and expecting a child, and they need a place that may have room for his devoted mother (Anna Marie Horsford’s Denise). Former soap star JD (Luke Wilson) and his vivacious and desperate trophy wife Margo (Linda Cardellini) live across the street and they’re eyeing the house as well, though she doesn’t know how dire his career situation is and he doesn’t know that she’s having an affair. The above is information gleaned fairly early in the premiere — no spoilers of note.
To tell you what is actually about, though, I’d have to give away information revealed by the end of that first chapter (no later), so skip the next paragraph if you want to be wholly unspoiled. The essential early spoiler is that Paul and Lydia are still roiled with grief from the murder of their teenage son three years earlier. In the house.
So far as the world knows, it was an unsolved crime tied to a string of recent break-ins in the neighborhood. Only Paul, Lydia and Paul’s ne’er-do-well brother Mikey ( ) know otherwise. Soon — “immediately,” really — Paul and Lydia are going to have to reopen the case and reopen the wounds, as they and every other couple learn valuable lessons about the importance of honesty and not committing murder to a healthy relationship.
So it’s half whodunnit, and half whoboughtit. I’d personally have called it , but isn’t awful either, because the show is (again like ) about the ugly steps that good people are sometimes willing to take in order to stay alive or to get a turnkey house with a citrus garden, ornamental arches and purloined crime scene evidence in East Los Angeles. is both mysterious, kinda, and zany — like if , and Alfred Hitchcock had a baby.
There’s abrupt violence, people coming back from the dead, wacky misunderstandings, full-on breakdowns and plenty of speculation about how much over-asking it takes to get a murder house in this economy. It’s all pushed along by the aggressive musical score from Siddhartha Khosla ( , ), who has made “zany mystery” into his own personal brand, and by the aggressive direction from Silver Tree and (for two midseason episodes) Feldman, who prowl the central residence like they know every dark corner and every undocumented eccentricity in its floor plan. In several trademark POV shots, they even take us into the plumbing and electrical wiring.
Not all of the pieces are created equal. The mystery is the show’s weak link, insofar as it takes a long time to decide what actually needs to be solved. Too many of the revelations defy even rudimentary logic and there isn’t enough effective suspense to spackle over the plot holes.
The resolution is unsatisfying, but not in a “maybe things will get set straight in a second season” way. After the finale, there’s perhaps one plot thread that remains open-ended, and I wouldn’t think it’d be enough to justify another season. Yet Netflix isn’t calling it a “limited series,” which is what it feels like.
What is fully satisfying is the tormented strain in Paul and Lydia’s marriage and the way their distance plays out through the performances by Kudrow and Romano. Feldman had a perfect cast in and, once again, her leads have been expertly chosen. Kudrow and Romano have built their post-sitcom-supernova careers on playing characters who have been desperate for so long that their desperation defines them.
Paul and Lydia are estranged but completely co-dependent, and I spent much of the premiere wondering if the biggest twist was going to be that they were ghosts haunting a property they literally can’t leave. Instead, they’re shells of people haunting a property they can’t bear to leave, and Romano’s hangdog weariness and Kudrow’s breaking-point fragility are both put to good use. They need each other, but sometimes they need to hurt each other.
When the two characters have it out, all of the stars’ TV-honed slick, comic professionalism gives way to raw, exposed nerves. Of the two, Kudrow is the standout because of how good she is with the rest of the cast. Romano has one very funny, very implausible, very much forgotten subplot with Rogers.
But Kudrow gets to have hilarious scenes with Cardellini, going full bore throughout, and some good material with Leary, who isn’t miscast so much as his character is perplexingly underwritten, and with Chloe East as the couple’s daughter. There’s good material in the secondary storylines with each of the prospective buyers, but their material amounts to a lot of little curveballs and very few big payoffs, contributing more to the overall chaos than anything truly cathartic. The Leslie/Sarah storyline comes closest to feeling like it could be self-contained, since Jacobson and Liu have a good romantic warmth and they push the mystery along helpfully.
Cardellini and Wilson don’t need to have chemistry, since their marriage is a disaster (and their own dwelling is an expensive modernist nightmare), so they just get a good number of laughs — him with laconic Los Angeles/Hollywood satire and her with a character whose sexual appetites border on predatory. Although both Parris and Fagbenle are fine, neither has a character with a defined enough voice to give their relationship the nuance it needs to fit into this puzzle. is probably easiest to enjoy between episodes three and six.
The bold-faced twists are entertainingly ludicrous, the dialogue crackles and there’s enough unspoken anxiety and resignation in Kudrow and Romano’s performance to keep everything grounded. By the closing chapters, as realizes it needs to tie things together, even the characters seem to recognize the silliness. As Wilson’s JD puts it, “Oh Lord.
The revelations keep coming. And not the good kind.” I tend to agree and not in the way he meant it — though it’s impossible to be bored and hard not to be amused along the way.
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