‘No Good Deed’: Lisa Kudrow’s New Show Is Shockingly Unfunny

All the rocking musical cues in the world can’t save No Good Deed from its own humorless wackiness.

Liz Feldman’s follow-up to Dead to Me is an ensemble effort that believes it’s a dark comedy because it’s about sinister secrets and lies and features lots of ostensibly funny people acting frazzled and freaked-out. Yet good luck finding anything enthralling, suspenseful or amusing about its intricate tale, as this eight-episode Netflix series, premiering Dec. 12, merely piles a raft of implausible elements on top of a preposterous premise to create a condemnable edifice of bad jokes, lame mysteries, and strained performances.

Paul (Ray Romano) and Lydia Morgan (Lisa Kudrow) are selling their Los Feliz house even though Lydia doesn’t really want to leave, given that it’s where they raised their kids Jacob (Wyatt Aubrey) and Emily (Chloe East). During an open house run by real estate agent Greg (Matt Rogers), a sassy guy whose every utterance sounds like it was written by Bruce Vilanch, they spy on their visitors from Jacob’s bedroom via a security-camera feed.

Of these prospective buyers, the ones of note are district attorney’s office prosecutor Leslie (Abbi Jacobson) and her doctor wife Sarah (Poppy Liu), novelist Dennis (O-T Fagbenle) and his pregnant spouse Carla (Teyonah Parris), and soap opera actor JD Campbell (Luke Wilson), who arrives incognito because he lives across the street in a modernist mansion with trophy wife Margo Starling (Linda Cardellini).

These disparate Californians are all hiding things from their partners and the world. Sarah is upset that IVF treatments haven’t panned out and Leslie isn’t particularly upset about it. Carla is unhappy with the fact that Dennis is so close with his mom (Anna Maria Horsford) that he’s planning on letting her help pay for the place and, then, move in with them. And JD is frustrated with his current abode and spendthrift Margo, which makes sense considering that she’s a conniving sexpot who’s currently sleeping with Gwen (Kate Moennig), a developer, in the hopes of convincing her to buy Paul and Lydia’s place.

Each of these individuals is lying about more than just these initial issues, transforming No Good Deed into a festival of deception led by Paul and Lydia, who—as teased by snippets of dialogue and fragmentary flashbacks—apparently covered up the true cause of their son Jacob’s death.

To do this, they enlisted the help of junkie Mikey (Denis Leary), who’s just been released from prison and detests Paul because of something having to do with Jacob’s demise and their thorny past. Feldman plays things cagily during No Good Deed’s first few installments, but that generates little genuine intrigue, since everyone is a clown and their behavior is dimly far-fetched, including Mikey’s decision to use the evidence he has about Jacob’s passing to blackmail Paul and Lydia—the latter of whom he openly pines for—to the tune of $80,000.

Lydia, a concert pianist who lost the ability to play after the death of her son, responds by selling her grand piano. Little does she know, however, that the night before, Paul hid in it a gun related to Jacob’s killing—a bit of nonsense that’s compounded by the fact that nosy Leslie saw him do this while breaking into their backyard because she was curious about who had been hiding in a locked upstairs bedroom during the open house.

This is all absurd but No Good Deed refrains from indulging in cartoonishness; rather, it occupies a deadening middle ground that prevents it from being truly silly or serious. The result is a drag that grows more labored with each new detail, such as Lydia’s conviction that the flickering light in Jacob’s bedroom is the dead boy speaking to her.

Cutesy use of Ozzy Osbourne’s “Mama, I’m Coming Home,” Mötley Crüe’s “Home Sweet Home,” and Kansas’ “Carry on Wayward Son” proves a wan attempt at energizing the largely staid proceedings, and the same is true of recurring CGI shots that zoom through the dark vents and pipes of Paul and Lydia’s home. It’s a lot of look-at-me embellishment that can’t conceal, or do something about, the show’s lack of energy or wit.

There’s nothing inventive about No Good Deed, nor any reason to care about these intertwined strangers, most of whom are downright off-putting, beginning with dour Paul and maudlin Lydia. It’s almost an impressive feat for a show to feature so many talented performers and elicit so few chuckles. Horsford and Parris bicker, Jacobson drops a few Hebrew words (“This feels bashert”), and Wilson fumes and flails, but their characters are dreary two-dimensional caricatures without originality or flair. The sole cast member given anything to do is Cardellini as the gaudy Margo, and even she’s stranded by a story that simply renders her the scheming gold-digger she appeared to be from the start.

Romano and Kudrow would seem an inspired comedic pair and yet No Good Deed manages to squander them both in roles that are too dismal to charm and too ludicrous to believe. Rarely has a series hinged on so many unconvincing developments and twists as this one, with everyone desperately conspiring to acquire Paul and Lydia’s abode (which is just, you know, a nice suburban residence) and outlandishly involving themselves in the couple’s life and the unsolved slaying of Jacob.

Striving to imagine house-hunting as a carnival of kooky personalities and shady secrets, it comes up with only tiresome hijinks and even lamer familial bathos, be it with regards to Lydia’s grief and sorta-kinda fondness for Mikey, Mikey and Paul’s ongoing feud, or Paul and Lydia’s neighbor Phyllis (Linda Lavin) periodically poking her nose in other people’s business for contrived plot reasons.

As a multi-pronged, homicide-centric series starring a collection of character actors, No Good Deed faintly recalls Apple TV+’s The Afterparty, except minus the cleverness or laughs. Though its tale is resolved by its finale, the show—per streaming dictates—leaves open the possibility of future installments. If Netflix were wise, they’d quickly demolish such a misbegotten design.