Pros: Excellent acting duo of Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini; gradually revealing the plot; emphasis on issues relevant to middle-aged women. Cons: In general, the pace of the story is low; rather sluggish start to the series Dead to Me / “Dead to Me”
Genre drama, comedy
Creator Liz Feldman
Starring: Christina Applegate (Jen Harding), Linda Cardellini (Judy Hale), James Marsden (Steve Wood), Max Jenkins (Christopher Doyle), Sam McCarthy (Charlie Harding), Luke Rossler (Henry Harding), etc.
Netflix channel
Year of release 2019
Episodes 10
Site IMDb
Jan Harding lost her husband. While jogging in the evening, he was hit by a car. The driver fled the scene and all Jen dreams of is to find and punish the person responsible for Ted’s death. Gloomy and prone to fits of anger, Jen attends a support group for people who have suffered loss, where she meets Judy Hale, who is going through a similarly difficult period. Despite the fact that the women are complete opposites, they quickly become very close friends, and soon Judy moves into Jen’s house, which does not make her eldest teenage son very happy. The stranger is charming, smiling, kind and seems to sincerely want to help the suffering family. Naturally, each of the women has her own secrets, and soon this tangle will begin to unwind, revealing rather unpleasant details of the death of Ted Harding and the life of the Harding family.
However, Dead to Me is by no means a horror film, a detective story, or a mystical series. This is a social drama about the problems of middle-aged women. From episode to episode, adding details to the events of that fateful night, the authors want to talk about such problems as unequal relationships in marriage; support for a spouse who has suffered a serious loss or serious illness; relationship with children and parents; responsibility for one’s actions; the right to insist on one’s own, etc. The series raises issues such as consent to sex, infertility, breast cancer, adultery, etc. Moreover, it cannot be said that the authors use this topic only because of its relevance; the creator of the series, Liz Feldman, is really trying to show viewers that under the external well-being of successful women can hide a real hell. And it is very important to recognize these problems in time and provide support to your loved one.
Like Big Little Lies, Dead to Me adds a touch to the overall picture in each episode, and towards the end, the series, which starts out rather sluggishly and is generally slow, suddenly acquires depth and meaning. Yes, already in the ninth episode you can understand how everything will end in the end; after all, in Hollywood they honor Chekhov’s laws, but it’s still interesting to follow the events.
Like The Kominsky Method, in which everything rests on the magnificent acting duo of Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin, Dead for Me captivates with an excellent selection of actresses for the main roles. Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini seamlessly complement each other and interact amazingly in the frame. Like their characters, actresses almost the same age, Christina Applegate may be known to you from her guest role in Friends, for which she received an Emmy Award in 2004, Linda Cardellini for a similar guest role in Mad Men, which earned her an Emmy nomination. Interestingly, Applegate, like her character in Dead to Me, had breast cancer.
Although Dead to Me is technically a dark comedy, there is little actual humor in this series, and by and large, it all comes down to the awkwardness in the dialogue of the main characters and the fact that we, as viewers, know a little more than the participants in the story.
Despite the cliffhanger at the end, Dead to Me has an open ending. In the second season, if Netflix decides to renew the show, the authors can move it in any direction. However, the story can be completed, because, by and large, it is closed. There were only two middle-aged women left who had lost everything.
Conclusion:
An interesting story of female friendship, which is fully revealed by the season finale
