Pop Culture Happy Hour - No Good Deed

Episode Date: December 16, 2024

Nobody ever said the housing market was easy. In the new Netflix ensemble dark comedy No Good Deed, a couple played by Lisa Kudrow and Ray Romano, along with several other couples and families, get tangled up in the sale of a home that holds a secret. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Nobody ever said the housing market was easy. In the new Netflix ensemble dark comedy, no good deed, the lives of several couples and families get tangled up in the sale of a home that holds a secret. The cast includes Ray Romano, Lisa Kudrow, Dennis Leary, Linda Cardalini, Luke Wilson, Tiana Paris, Abby Jacobson, and believe it or not, a whole lot of other people. And who will ultimately end up with the house, maybe the least of the story's important questions? I'm Linda Holmes, and today we're talking about No Good Deed on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. Joining me today is NPR's TV critic Eric Deggans. Hey, Eric. Welcome back.

Thanks for having me. Also with us is the co-host of Slate's ICYMI podcast and former. We always say pop culture happy hour producer, Candice Lim. Hey, Candice. Hello. So No Good Deed is a dark comedy series that was created by Liz Feldman. You might remember her previous series, dead to me. And if you do, this has a kind of a similar feel in that it's sometimes quite funny, but it also has big helpings of pain and disaster. Ray Romano and Lisa Kudrow play Paul and Lydia, a couple preparing to sell their very beautiful house while also recovering from the death of their son. Just make sure we find the right buyers who get how special this house is, how special

you made it. Of course. On top of that, Paul's brother, Mikey, is out of prison and has some kind of agenda, he's played by Dennis Leary. Their realtor, played by the very funny Matt Rogers, is trying to work on a few potential buyers. Carla and Dennis, played by Tiana Paris and O.T. Fegbenle, are a couple about to have a baby under the watchful eye of Dennis' mom. Oh, my gosh. Look at these wood beams. They're original to the house, babe. You can tell. No, you can tell because you're smart because you're my sex little architect. Leslie and Sarah, played by Abby Jacobson and Poppy Liu. have recently abandoned their IVF efforts and are interested in a beautiful place to start over.

How many times have we walked past this house? So many times. Somehow even prettier inside. Yeah. The sale of the house has also caught the attention of Paul and Lydia's neighbors, J.D. and Margot, played by Luke Wilson and Linda Cardalini. J.D. is an actor, and Margo is your basic spoiled Hollywood nightmare wife with secrets of her own. What if we moved across the street? I mean, you've always loved that house, even after everything that happened. And Harper could stay in her same school.

As if you even know where Harper goes to school. Of course I do. As the series unfolds, all these people face down secrets and resentments, and Paul and Lydia try to repair the damage that their son's death and their handling of it has done to their family. There's a lot packed into this show. I'm sure it sounds like it's all over the place when you hear it described. Maybe it is a little bit all over the place. No Good Deed is streaming now on Netflix.

Candice, I'm going to start with you. What's your sort of bottom line vibe on this show? Bottom line vibes are good. I really like the show. I think it is a very good holiday watch with the family because there's nothing really like controversial or scandalous, aka no sex scenes. Dark, no, dark. And I think this show is also so streaming because almost every episode ends on a cliffhanger. It's very like the traitor's vibes.

And sometimes it kind of feels like a P-Foc show. But I think that after like a decade of Netflix shows, people are quite familiar with the look of this show, the sheen of it, which is kind of dead to me. I sometimes get like Grace and Frankie vibes to it where it's like, you know, this is a set and there is a soap opera nist to the dialogue sometimes. Well, their shows have a look. There's a look. And I think at the end of the day, the show is actually quite, quite good at having multiple entry points. and by that I mean the cast. Because I kind of feel like everyone has one person

that they watched a show for. For me, it was Matt Rogers, because I'm a reader first, pelvis's second, and I thought he ate. Well, there's a reason that buyers and sellers don't meet. Are you going to tell me the reason? No, I just want you to go. I would say a lot of the cast surprised me.

I thought O.T. Fag Ben-Lay. Poppy Liu was really great. I actually don't know them very well, but this really turned me onto them. And at the end of the day, I think this is technically a thriller. So they really test your patience, but it worked on me. And I've been to this in like one weekend, which is funny because what's like one of the most popular activities to do on the weekend, go to an open house.

That's true. That's true. All right, Eric, how about you, bottom line vibe on this show? I was much more conflicted and enjoyed this a lot less. I'll be honest. You may think it's about a bunch of people trying to buy a house. It is really a show about a death and how a bunch of people deal with that death. So if you're thinking about it as a holiday experience, you know, know that there is something pretty serious and tragic at the heart of this story.

There's also a lot of cursing and there's also sex jokes. So if you're sitting down to watch it with your family and there's young kids in the room, I would say be very careful about that. But on top of all of that, I think this show is an example of something that we've seen in streaming where they either put too little in the show because they want people to watch as many episodes as possible or they put too much. in the series because they're afraid that people will get disinterested. And this is a show that is packed with storylines, it is packed with characters. It is packed with different ideas about even what the show is about. Sometimes it's about the lies that you tell your partners

and the people you're related to and the people that you care about. On another level, it's about how a tragedy can ruin a family and how they might come back from it. On another level, it's about all the weird people people that come into your house when you're trying to sell it. There's a whole bunch of stuff. And there's a bunch of really great performances here. Ray Romano is always, I think, an entirely underappreciated actor.

This is a guy who handles drama and comedy and everything in between really well. And he covers it up with this sort of deadpan. I don't know what I'm doing here kind of thing. You know, he is excellent in this. What do you love, boys? You're right on me? No. What's the matter?

Me shrieking like a little girl. that doesn't turn you on? I feel like there's no good way to answer that. You know, everyone is excellent in this, but in the end, it took me two or three tries to get through it all. Oh, interesting. Yeah, I think I come down sort of more in the Candace column, but for some of the Eric reasons in the sense that I think that I certainly found it to be shaggy and a little bit

all over the place. However, I think the performances kind of kept me plugged into it. That is Ray Romano, who I think's great in this. Lisa Kudor, I think's very good in this. Luke Wilson and Linda Cardalini are mostly called upon to be comic, much more than most of the other folks. I think they're very good. Please, I'm begging you. Don't go.

I can't live without you. Well, Lord, that Bronco out there, it ain't going to ride itself. What about this Bronco? Like Candace, I also enjoyed Poppy Liu. I think that her relationship with Abby Jacobson, lovely, enjoyed it. Such a family host, don't you think? Just because we don't have kids does not mean we're not a family. And I really enjoyed, you know, I just saw O.T. Feg Benla in the presumed innocent adaptation,

doing kind of very dramatic and effective and kind of quirky work in that show. In this, he's a much more sort of openly comedic guy who, who's still a little bit under the thumb of his mother, who, by the way, is played by the great Anna Maria Horsford, who I was so happy to see in this. Do you two ever quit it? I mean, you're making everyone uncomfortable. We knew we went, Ma.

We're supposed to be lovy-dovey. Is it bad that she reminds me of my mom a little bit? I don't think it's bad. I think she's supposed to remind a lot of people of their moms, honestly. And I think his dynamic with Tiana Paris is very nice. I liked that story. And I did keep coming back to kind of caring about this marriage between Kudrow and Romano. And this, like, weird, I'm not a big Dennis Leary guy, but the use of him in this, I think, is wisely kind of limited.

He sort of flits in and creates chaos and then he flits back out for a while. He's not in it all the time. How you been? I was prison. Make any nice friends? Nah. Most of the other white guys were skinheads, so I spent the bulk of my time in myself, which you would have known if you ever came to visit me.

We made mention of this, but I think Matt Rogers is having such a good time in this in getting to play kind of a bitchy realtor. He's like playing somebody who would be selling real estate on Bravo. Yeah. Well, because I'm a gay realtor in L.A. I must know where to get drugs. No, no. I am not a stereotype, sir. I am a person.

I, I'm sorry. Sorry, I just assume because I see you sniff a lot. That's because I have allergies, okay? We're in the middle of a super bloom. My point is, I think because of the performances, I pretty easily overlooked the fact that it is overstuffed, which I definitely do not disagree with. I'm curious what you guys thought about the general kind of Liz Feldman tonal thing, which is trying to have a certain amount of, like, farcelling. comedy going on while there's also a lot of very heavy stuff going on because it's the same thing that happened in Dead to Me. I guess what I would say is I thought it worked better and

dead to me. And that is a smaller show. Like that's mostly about the Linda Cardalini and Christina Applegate relationship. Exactly. And I do think that maybe that was one thing that I had a problem with was that, you know, you're in the comedy and then something really dramatic happens that might be a little outlandish. And then you sort of go, what was that? And, you know, and then you had to wrap your brain around, that thing that just happened. Like, a number of outlandish things happened during the course of this show, any one of which could have been a show by itself.

Sure. It was pulling me out some of the bigger swings that the story takes and making me sort of very aware of what she was doing. Much of the time I was watching this, I was wishing it was just 25% better. I mean, I want to jump in real quick because I think that there's kind of two things going on here. The first is just kind of like the Liz Feldman vibe, the tone. She did say that the show is kind of in the same universe as dead to me. So that's one barrier.

I actually want to ask you guys, how do you think this ranks among the ensemble shows of the year? Because I think this show is at least better than the perfect couple, which is also a Netflix show starring Nicole Kidman. That, like, I really hated that show. But I do think that like it is harder than maybe we think to do crisscrossing lines of that. And a lot of that is up to the casting. So like putting together four couples with chemistry like the ones they have in the show is hard. And then letting them kind of like criss cross with each other. I'm thinking of like Matt Rogers and Ray Romano having like these whole scenes just the two of them. I thought that was really sweet. And it worked for me, I think. Yeah. You know, I think one thing that Netflix in particular is experimenting with is exactly as you say, Candice, these kind of. of big ensembles where there's sort of somebody for everybody, right? And that's how the perfect couple was. You had your Nicole Kidman. You had your Leop Schreiber. You had your Eve Hewson and Megan Fahey. Yeah, a little bit of everybody, right? And you throw a big ensemble, a story. And from a

logistical perspective, I have to assume that one of the advantages is that no one of those people that you've cast has to work all the time, like the whole time. They've just raised. They've just rounded up this very big kind of crowd of people. In terms of where it ranks, it's interesting because I liked the perfect couple. Candice, we've not getting into a throwdown about the perfect couple over the... I mean, I liked it as what it was. Right, right, right. And I, you know, I hate to be the Grinch here.

Not at all. Because I'm also somebody who didn't like the perfect couple. Oh, thank you, Eric. Oh, that's okay. Listen, I'm in the minority, though. And I can't really defend this. But I'm also going to be a little cynical about the... structure of the show and say that when you hire Ray Romano and Lisa Kudrow and Dennis Leary and

O.T. Fagg. Benley and Luke Wilson, they better have something to do, right? So they all have to have substantive stuff to do in this show, which then again creates a situation where you have a bunch of different plot lines because you have to service all these different characters and make sure that every one of these name actors who could be in a different show of their own probably, make sure that they all have enough to do. We get a lot of table setting, just who are these people and what do they want? And how does that fit into this larger narrative? And I will admit that in the beginning, I didn't know much about the show.

So I thought it was going to be about, hey, when you go to sell your home in L.A., you get all these crazy people coming in your house. And I was not down for eight episodes of that. So it took a couple of episodes for me to even realize, okay, well, this is about something else. And what I like about the show is that at its heart, it really is about how you communicate with the people that you care about in your life and how corrosive lies can be when they're a part of that communication and how tragedy can atomize a family if it gets wrapped up in lies and people not having the courage to be honest with each other about things. Well, I think, Eric, unfortunately, you are not selling Sunset Pilled like some of us because I have to say. I love that this show has a strong premise. I think that's one thing that I feel like is missing from the perfect couple or all these other like ensemble shows.

I feel like Peacock does this a lot. I think that centering the show around real estate and like literally buying one house does kind of gravitate everyone towards the center that I really enjoy. Because I just think about the fact that buying a house is always never about buying a house, both in life and TV shows. The discrepancy when it comes to real estate is that supply will never even. will demand. You have one house. You really only need one buyer. And here are five people asking over. And I think that there is something really interesting about the way this show kind of portrays that, which is that when you buy a house, you're not buying the house. What you're buying is the kitchen to cook for your future family. You want the five bedrooms, the house of kids you haven't even thought about yet. You want the

yard for the dog that hasn't even been rescued. And I think in that way, one person from each couple has like a one-on-one with Lydia or Paul. And they do this thing where they like draw you in emotionally and they're like, yeah, like there's this like void I want to fill in my life. And I just really am seeking that for myself and they draw them in. And then they hit them with like, I'm about to have a son. Congrats. Yeah, good for you. That's great. I can't tell you what it would mean to me to be able to raise him in this house for as long as I have to raise him.

I appreciate that. It's like hunting for a job. You will say anything you can to convince the person across the room that you are the one. You're the only one. And that's why I kind of like what this show did, because it showed like this perfect, like, interesting octagon of everyone coming for the same thing with so, so many different weird tactics. And I kind of like seeing it from the buyer side as well. I thought that was kind of interesting.

Yeah, so we wrote you a letter just about how much we love your house. Yeah. And we're willing to go over asking. Oh, really? How much over? Maybe I've just been traumatized because I've gone through that process a few times. I'm not sure I want to relive it by watching it on TV. That's true.

That's true. I completely get that. And I think, Candace, my reaction to what you're saying is that I also think it's really promising to make a house the center of a bunch of different stories, right? I would have loved to see a little more time spent on those things. And again, maybe this is just a function of what we've been talking about, which is that there's just a whole lot to do here. There's eight episodes. They're more in the half hour range than the hour range. So you're dealing with, like, you know, a relatively small canvas on which to map out the,

this entire story of Paul and Lydia and lots of flashbacks and what exactly happened with their son when he died, which has a whole bunch of other things that fly off of it. And then also to deal with everything that you want to say about these other folks. I mean, maybe in today's media age, you need a show that's hop scotches across so many different kinds of stories to keep people engaged. But for me, I just sort of felt like, man, if this had just been a little more focused, then we could really dig into, you know, one part of it and really have that sort of fleshed out rather than feeling like just when we're getting to something, hey, we're on to the next,

we're on to the other storyline, we're on to the other idea. Yeah, I somehow believe that even though you, the two of you have very different feelings about this show, I think you are both right. Thank you so much. That is where I think I am coming down. I think the advantage of a show that is fundamentally four-ish hours long to watch. the entire thing, is if you really like Ray Romano or Lisa Kudrow or Abby Jacobson, I think it's worth your time to check it out. And honestly, I'm not going to lie to you.

If there's a story going on in it that you're not as into and you go skipy, skippy, skippy, skippy. Or go on the phone. Go on Zillow. I'm not telling you how to live. I'm just saying, I think you guys are both right. That's, that is, that's my bottom line vibe. Just call Linda the TV critics Switzerland. Well, we want to know what you think about no good deed. Find us at Facebook.com slash PCH. That brings us to the end of our show. Eric Deggans, Candice Lim.

This is really fun. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Always a pleasure. I enjoy talking about this more than I actually thought I would. That's great. Eric, I'm so sorry to do this, but I really think season one selling Sunset will hit that it for you. We'll talk about mortgage rates, interest rates, interior.

Candice, that is so incredibly not going to happen. It brings together the two things I can't stand, which is reality TV and shows about real estate. So there you go. Wow, wow. Then this show never had you. This show never had you. All right.

This episode is produced by Liz Metzger and Lenin Sherbourne and edited by Mike Katzif. Our supervising producer is Jessica Reedy. Hello, come in, provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Linda Holmes, and we'll see you all tomorrow.