Dead to Me (2019): Mildly Entertaining, Mildly Offensive
One of my most recent binges is Dead to Me, starring Christina Applegate (Jen) and Linda Cardenelli (Judy). It chronicles the lives of these two women in the wake of mourning, and the events that put them on a collision course with one another. Spoilers for the pilot ahead: Jen’s husband Ted was killed in a hit and run by an unidentified driver. Judy, meanwhile, is grieving the “loss” of her husband Steve to a heart attack. They meet at a grief support group, and immediately Judy gravitates toward Jen. At first, it just seems like the meet-cute setup of any other oddball pairing — the sardonic, uptight Jen with the sincere, free spirit Judy. After some initial resistance, Jen, galvanized by a heartbreaking proclamation from her youngest son, decides that it would be healthy to have someone who knows what she is going through, and they kindle a warm, believable friendship that starts with late night phone conversations driven by insomnia to in person wine and Entenmann’s cookies binges.
It is revealed to us in the first episode that Judy’s husband (played by a hunky James Marsden) is actually not dead; he in fact left Judy after multiple miscarriages. This major plot twist is revealed early enough in the pilot that the writers are able to spend adequate time addressing the fallout from Judy’s deception on her and Jen’s nascent friendship. Even if the miscarriage detail is deployed as a surefire way to garner sympathy (who wouldn’t side with Judy after FIVE miscarriages?!) it is delivered oh so convincingly in a heartfelt, vulnerable performance by Cardenelli. Secondly, the final shot of the episode reveals that Judy is hiding a Mustang with a “person sized dent” in a nondescript storage shed. What does this mean — could she have been the driver that killed Ted?! It’s the big mystery/betrayal that will unfurl over the course of the next nine episodes.
Overall, the series is enjoyable, and highly watchable, if at times a little familiar. It has been compared to both Big Little Lies and Desperate Housewives, probably for its centering of (white) women wrapped up in an enticing murder mystery that takes place in a placid, seemingly safe environment. The pulse of the show feels more similar to that of Desperate Housewives, though, and not just because both shows take place in the suburbs. Whereas Big Little Lies’ mystery is funneled through a serious, high-gloss, noir aesthetic, Dead to Me is punctuated by the deliberately dark and campy humor that made DH so indelible. The irreverence is anchored by Judy’s new age-y eccentricities and Jen’s caustic humor. Applegate delivers a particularly memorable performance as the grieving widow who works through grief via aggression and deprecation toward others. Her comedic timing is perfect, as when she goes around offering potential clients pinwheel sandwiches at an open house; yet she is able to deliver scenes of mourning with equal conviction. The key supporting player here is James Marsden, who is perfectly cast, though slightly underused, as a smarmy, money laundering sleazebag to whom Judy can’t seem to extricate herself.
The last thing I’ll say about the show is its racial politics. This isn’t a show about race; yet that doesn’t mean that there is no room for cultural commentary on how the characters of color are depicted and used within the storyline. Even if race isn’t explicitly woven into the storyline, race and racialization processes are still at work in the depictions. The show delegates nearly all characters of color to throwaway recurring roles. There’s Keong Sim, who plays the pastor at the grief support group where Judy and Jen first meet. We’ve seen this tired trope of Asian masculinity before countless times — the desexualized Asian man who is treated as a doormat and made to be the butt of the joke. Often the target of Jen’s verbal abuse, he seems to exist merely to accentuate how much more dynamic/badass and fully realized a character Jen is. (For example, she attends his grief support, yet constantly belittles his tactics and boldly claims that “she hasn’t gotten anything out of it.”) Jen also has an Asian American woman, who bakes her a “Mexican lasagna” with jalapenos and raisins(!!) in the wake of her husband’s death and is such an incredibly boring housewife-next-door that Jen quickly regrets asking her to hang out.
Judy briefly dates a black detective named Nick (Brandon Scott), who functions as both a romantic/sexual rebound for Judy while she is trying to extricate herself from Steve and a “magical negro” who is oh so nice and eagerly willing to help Judy’s BFF Jen track down her husband’s killer. Magical Negroes have a long history in American popular culture and exist primarily to uplift white protagonists in their darkest moments (think Hattie McDaniel’s Mammie, Morgan Freeman in Driving Miss Daisy, Michael Duncan in The Green Mile, etc). Inevitably, Judy realizes she can’t excise Steve from her life (I mean, with that bone structure, who can blame her?) and breaks up with Nick, and he’s not even the least bit bitter about it! Finally, there’s a black woman who is Judy’s manager at the retirement home where she works. Ed Asner plays a senior citizen at the home who strikes up a close friendship with Judy. In one scene, when Judy asks her manager for a raise, Asner’s character threatens bodily violence against the black woman if she doesn’t comply. What, exact, is funny here? Am I missing something? Black women are physically, economically, and emotionally targeted by white supremacy on a daily basis; how is it responsible for a TV show to be so casually and cavalierly tossing in a line about bodily harm against black women masked as chivalry?
All in all, the show is fine, and I wouldn’t say I WON’T watch season 2. But at the end of the day, it’s just that — watchable but not great. As Katharyn VanArendok argues in a piece for Vulture, it seems as if the writers just cobbled together dramatic and comedic elements from all its women-fronted contemporaries, DH, BLL, How to Get Away with Murder, Revenge, all of which are superior, I would add. All in all, it reminds me how much I miss the lurid, kooky humor of DH and accentuates my anticipation for Big Little Lies season 2!
