Dead to Me

Yes, the series has humor (Applegate is too nuanced to let that go), but it’s not the laughfest you expect from something labeled “sitcom.” This is more ironic.

Applegate and Cardellini are never really bad in anything, and they’re terrific here on their own. But when they’re together, when they provide the messy, funny, undeniably warm rapport that defines this unusual friendship, “Dead to Me” (please forgive the phrase) comes to life. It makes the show’s occasional missteps—a twist too many, the odd joke too knowing, and a finale that feels like it belongs to a different series, to name a few—well worth enduring.

Like many good dramas, everything is constructed around an initial act of deception; once you know about it, you’ll spend the rest of this easily addictive series fretting about when and how the truth will finally come out.

Really, it’s Applegate’s, and she rises to that calling with the confident commitment of an old pro. This kind of role was a long time coming for Applegate. It’s a pleasure to watch her take Dead to Me’s imperfect machinery and, when the show is at its best, bend it into something sublime.

While sustaining this sort of story is invariably a juggling act, this has the self-assured feel of a hit-and-run tale that's destined to keep running for at least a while.

Dead to Me is far less interested in Jen and Judy’s connection than it is in the Big Secret that could destroy it. ... The show is at its best when Jen and Judy are just hanging out, talking about things that aren’t Secret-adjacent.

As the show suggests, we tend to see other people not as they are but as we need them to be, constructing elaborate fictions to convince ourselves that we’ll never get hurt by the people we love. It’s a depressing truth about relationships of all kinds--and Cardellini and Applegate mine it richly in this absurdist caper.

Dead to Me is at its strongest when presenting such tangled psychological landscapes in order to reorient our understanding of loss. It’s funny and sad, often both and rarely neither, a compelling and quietly radical depiction of grief’s emotional haze.

It’s an odd blend of tones that doesn’t always work, but the smart, spiky humor and standout performances from stars Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini combine to make it a satisfyingly offbeat binge.

A breezy, shallow comedy about an angry, grieving woman searching for her husband’s killer and the friend she makes along the way. Across its ten half-hour episodes creator Liz Feldman connects one watchable moment on top of another, hanging everything together curiously, if not altogether successfully. It helps that the series is constructed around a pair of brilliant performances by Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini

As a whole first season, though, those pieces add up to something a little uncanny, a series that feels both highly considered and also weirdly underbaked.

It's a complicated and occasionally fascinating depiction of female friendship boasting a pair of fantastic performances from Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini. It's a decent and sometimes perceptive examination of grief. And it's a very thin and rushed murder mystery that isn't exactly perfectly suited to 10 half-hour episodes.

Dead to Me‘s later episodes try to lean on character drama whenever possible, and Applegate and (especially) Cardellini get some strong moments as various truths come to light. But the season concludes with a cliffhanger that left me less interested in where things go next, and wishing we could go back to the grief retreat for some more laughs and tears.

[An expert cast] helps make palatable a relentlessly twisty scenario that is rarely as shocking as it seems to think it is. Still, it's a brisk ride to a cliffhanger end. [29 Apr - 12 May 2019, p.11]

The structure of the show, which leans hard on cliffhangers and the charm of its leads, keeps it zipping along; every episode ends with enough immediate intrigue that letting it autoplay into the next quickly becomes second nature. But by the end, its persistent attempts to surprise us dulls the impact of its overall story.

There is a winning comedy along the lines of The Golden Girls and a poignant coming-of-middle-age story like Better Things hidden in Dead To Me; the real mystery is why they aren’t the focus of the show.

I’m pretty sure there was a Lifetime version of this story and the best part was it was over in two hours. Cardellini does the best she can, but the writing for her character and her motivations make no sense.

There’s some ingenuity in the ways Feldman works out the story’s complications. ... But at the heart of the story, things don’t really add up or carry the emotional weight they should, because Judy and Jen are ideas more than characters.

Dead To Me is too committed to its plot and too unaware of its tone. It rides its big secret — a secret the audience knows from the end of Episode 1 onward — all the way to the finale, demanding you invest in characters who refuse to honestly invest in each other.