Creator Liz Feldman on Jacob’s Death, season 2

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers from the first season of “No Good Deed,” now streaming on Netflix.

In Netflix’s ‘No Good Deed’, the house is where the murder took place, and yet that still hasn’t deterred the buyers of the home on Derby Drive.

In the season finale of ‘Dead to Me’ creator Liz Feldman’s new series, expectant parents Sarah (Poppu Liu) and Leslie (Abbi Jacobson) saw their offer on the Los Feliz house accepted by sellers Lydia (Lisa Kudrow) and Paul . (Ray Romano). But the deal only came after Leslie’s pushy lawyer instincts kicked in and inadvertently helped Lydia and Paul uncover the truth behind their son’s death. The secret they’d been keeping all season — they thought their daughter Emily (Chloe East) had accidentally shot and killed her brother Jacob (Wyatt Aubrey) because they thought he was a burglar — wasn’t what actually happened . The fatal shot actually came from Margo (Linda Cardellini), the Morgans’ ruthless neighbor who was having an affair with teenage Jacob, an affair that he threatened to expose after she called it off.

On that tragic evening, Margo found Jacob, dressed in a burglar outfit, complete with the ill-fitting balaclava, in her bedroom and stole back all the stolen jewelry he had given her. But Margo wasn’t one to give up a gift, especially an expensive one. She chased him back to his house and demanded that he keep quiet about their affair. When he didn’t comply, she shot him. Coincidentally, her bullet reached him before Emily’s, who thought someone was breaking into their house.

The truth redeems Emily and lets her parents breathe a sigh of relief about that night that tore them apart with grief. Yes, their son Jacob died that night, but learning that Emily didn’t kill him allowed them to finally start healing. It also gave them the motivation to go ahead and sell it to Sarah and Leslie, even though they are not originally who Feldman says she planned to eventually donate the house to. The original winners were actually the first people viewers saw exploring the house in the series.

“There’s a really quick little cameo in the pilot from my dear friend Vanessa Bayer, and in my script I called them the ‘spark plug couple,’” Feldman says. Variety. “They’re the couple you don’t root for. You get the sense that they’ve probably seen a bunch of houses, and they’re not really emotionally invested in them. So I originally thought it might be nice if the house ended up with the Bougie family, as if to say that this is just a house and in the end it’s just an exchange of money… So that’s why I got Vanessa cast in that role. , because we would complete the circle.”

But after months of working on the story and working with the writers, the house on Derby Drive wasn’t just any house. Feldman says they came to see it as its own character, and that it deserved a happy ending. “To give the house a happy ending, we wanted to give it to Leslie and Sarah wanted to let the house heal itself because they know exactly what happened there,” Feldman says. “They know the truth, and I think sometimes we think there’s something dark in a house because there’s been a death. But in a way, once you know the truth about it and appreciate the whole story, it comes back to light.”

The secrets were not limited to Paul and Lydia’s home. Margo’s increasingly shameful schemes to maintain her fancy life and false identity –– we see you, country bumpkin Luann! – finally caught up with her. After beating herself up in a wild attempt to claim she was a battered husband, her scorned actor husband JD (Luke Wilson) set their house on fire while she was upstairs in a hot tub. However, she survived, being the ever resilient survivor that she is. Feldman says the ending was too ridiculous to resist, given Margo’s stories about her brother’s unfortunate fire-related injuries. But after that ending, where half of Margo’s face is badly burned like a certain Batman villain, Feldman didn’t want Margo to stray too far into mustache-twirling villain territory.

“Linda is such a brilliant actress, I didn’t want to diminish the role,” she says. “And besides, in the writers’ room we say ‘mustache-twirling’ all the time.” That was our code, 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 she often got into big trouble. While filming one of Judy’s typically heartfelt scenes in Season 3, Feldman says Cardellini proclaimed that she needed a change.

“We were in the middle of shooting a scene where Judy probably did something incredibly selfless and threw herself in front of someone in front of the train, and Linda just said, ‘The next thing I do, I just want to play a badass bitch,'” Feldman recalls herself. “I love Linda, and we have such a great 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 bad guy around Feldman. “I don’t like the term ‘villain,’ even though there is truth to the level of psychopathy you find in certain people living in Los Angeles, and it was a lot of fun to be able to explore that and dive into that. and look how low such a man could go.”

In the aftermath of the revelations, Paul and Lydia managed to find their way back to each other after spending the season repeatedly expressing their caustic frustrations with the way the other was grieving Jacob. In the final scene, they join Emily on one of her music sets, where she plays a song composed by Jacob with lyrics written by her – and Lydia finally accompanies her on the piano again.

“We felt like they needed that catharsis,” Feldman says. “They had to speak their deepest, darkest, and hardest truths to each other instead of constantly trying to protect the other person’s feelings, thus dampening their own emotions and stuffing up their own shit. Because we wanted to give them as close to a happy ending as possible, we felt like we needed them to really confront what in the other person was bothering them most. The truth is that for them it was the other’s way of grieving the loss of their son.”

But she warns that while everything can be forgiven between the Morgans, don’t expect them to forget. “If you ever see them again, that might come up,” she teases.

Talking to Feldman about the season, it’s clear that she’s already put a lot of thought into the next chapter of this story, even though Netflix hasn’t formally greenlit a second season yet. When asked what kind of house Paul and Lydia will end up in after the move, she answers with an equally vague answer: “That’s a very good question that I’m not going to answer, because you never know what you will see in a season. 2.”

The same can be said about what lies ahead for Dennis (OT Fagbenle) and Carla (Teyonah Parris), who decided not to buy the Morgans’ home and instead build a new home on the now vacant lot that was once occupied was by the charred houses of JD and Margo. place of residence. With the arrival of their son, Dennis finishing his second book and coming to terms with the news that his father was not his biological father, they seem to have settled into a comfort zone. Except Dennis secretly cashes Carla’s billionaire father’s $5 million check to further their lifestyle. And now daddy comes along.

“We become the things we hate most about our parents, 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 he has now made the same mistake.”

The finale certainly sets everyone else up for some splashy things to do in a possible Season 2. JD was finally 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) is reunited with his police officer son Nate (Kevin Alves), who happens to be the one who arrests Margo in the final moments of the season. Even Greg the real estate agent (Matt Rogers) comes out smiling with an increasingly lucrative commission from the Morgans, and nosy neighbor Phyllis (Linda Lavin, for whom Feldman specifically wrote the role) has plenty to gossip about with a slew of new neighbors.

“I just want to say that I always had a season 2 in mind, and I think a show like this has legs if it’s done in a smart way,” Feldman says. “I’m very excited to talk to Netflix about what those plans are. They kind of know, but I do think this show still has some life left in it, and I really hope we get through it.