Yahoo Lifestyle No Good Deed Review: We’re Not Sold on Netflix’s Star-Studded But Flimsy Real Estate Comedy
Real estate can be life or death in Los Angeles. And that’s literally the case in the new comedy No Good Deed — now streaming on Netflix; I’ve seen four of the eight episodes — with a bevy of eager buyers scrambling to land a gorgeous dream home… a scramble that they all might not survive. This certainly feels like fertile ground for a dark comedy, and Netflix has assembled a ridiculously loaded cast to bring it to life, led by sitcom greats Ray Romano and Lisa Kudrow. But the foundation here is shaky: A wildly erratic tone and an overload of preposterous cliffhangers end up spoiling all the fun, leaving us with a bad case of buyer’s remorse.
Romano and Kudrow star as Paul and Lydia, the owners of a magnificent manse in a swanky Los Angeles neighborhood that they’ve put up for sale. But they’re secretly broke and need cash fast, and the potential buyers all have secrets, too, from infidelity to unemployment, from a secret pregnancy to a mysterious death that continues to loom large. The neighborhood is home to some longstanding grudges, too — “I will burn this place to the ground if we sell to someone like her,” Lydia says of one buyer — and when all these people show up for the open house and then fight it out to close the deal, their secrets can’t help but come to light.
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No Good Deed does have an undeniably fantastic cast at its disposal, from Luke Wilson as an unhappy soap actor to Linda Cardellini as a blonde temptress, from Denis Leary as a dangerous ex-con to the great Anna Maria Horsford as the overbearing mom of one prospective buyer. This cast is so stacked, it’s fun just to watch the actors bounce off of each other — but the writing lets them down. With Dead to Me and now this, series creator Liz Feldman specializes in twisty “trauma-dies,” liberally mixing light comedy with heavy tragedy and serving up big cliffhangers like clockwork. The cliffhangers here feel manufactured, though, as if dictated by a Netflix algorithm to keep us watching, and when some turn out to be red herrings, it just leaves us frustrated as viewers.
The tone shifts so wildly from scene to scene that we’re almost not sure what show we’re watching. The dialogue is laced with sharply written zingers that sting when they land — it even edges into camp at times, with Matt Rogers as an eager realtor and Linda Lavin as a nosy neighbor — but other scenes are bathed in melodrama and high-strung emotion. (Kudrow, in particular, is strangely sad and muted here as Lydia, and the mournful tone saps her of her vitality as a performer.) Plus, the story serves up outrageous twists that are utterly untethered to reality — I confess I rolled my eyes more than once at the heavy-handed plot machinations — and the bouncy musical score and winking needle drops just add to the oddly flippant tone.
All these wild twists might have worked if we actually cared about the characters, but they’re all kept strictly on the surface level, with each character given one dimension and one set of motivations. (It’s like there are so many stars in the cast, they didn’t have time to flesh out any of their characters.) Compare that to HBO’s The White Lotus, which also boasts an all-star cast, a satirical look at rich-people problems and a dead body. While Mike White always manages to find the humanity inside his oddball characters, here, it’s all just empty — and we’re left with a house so shoddy, a stiff wind could blow it over.
THE TVLINE BOTTOM LINE: Despite an all-star cast and a promising premise, Netflix’s No Good Deed falls victim to thin characterization and an inconsistent tone.
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