How do you follow up the exquisitely crafted first season of your TV show, one that delicately unravelled a mystery you weren’t quite expecting going in, while eliciting powerhouse performances from your female leads? That’s the question facing Dead to Me showrunner Liz Feldman heading into the second season of Netflix’s Laguna Beach set dramedy, and one the show doesn’t quite have a satisfactory answer to.
If you missed out on the acclaimed first season, it focused on widow Jen Harding (Christina Applegate) and her family, as she dealt with her grief and anger, over the the death of her husband in a hit and run accident. Jen managed these stresses in some… unique ways, while free spirit Judy Hale (Linda Cardellini) slowly made her way into Jen’s life and family.
You’ve Got a Friend in Me?
The joy of that first series came from exploring the unlikely relationship between these two very different women, as the show slowly revealed what really happened to Jen’s husband, Ted. Each new milestone in the relationship between Jen, her family, and Judy, was contrasted with a new bombshell regarding what actually happened to Ted, and what Judy’s involvement was. A few surprises about the state of Jen’s relationship with her husband were also thrown in for good measure. The reveal at the end of every episode built on, or subverted, what the audience thought they knew from the previous one.
Once again, the second season features a death in incredibly suspicious circumstances, with the details slowly unravelling over the season, but it doesn’t quite work as well as Season 1 did. It doesn’t help that the audience, more or less, knows what happened on this fateful night, and who was responsible from the off. The additional details added as the show goes on don’t really change your perception of the events, or characters, all that much.
What Would Judy Do?
The interplay between the hard-as-nails Applegate and the floaty, hippy Cardellini is, for the most part, as delightful as the first season, with some choice zingers throughout the season (“Jesus! You snuck up on me like a Prius.”) but Applegate’s Jen feels a little less likeable, more harsh, and harder to empathise with this time around.
In the previous season, she was dealing with her grief as best she could, refusing to suffer fools, or their attempts at soothing her, and chasing any careless drivers she came across in search of her husband’s killer.
Now she’s mostly frazzled, trying to avoid the fallout of yet another death. As the problems pile up, and clashes with Judy escalate, it’s not quite as much fun to watch. Things do improve after the first couple of fraught episodes, especially with a fun new twist to James Marsden’s role in the show, along with the addition of Natalie Morales to the cast. Oddly Morales all but disappears from the season as it approaches its end.
Dead to Me Season 3: Where’s Michelle?
Brandon Scott is also back as Nick Prager, but in a much reduced role. Like Marsden, however, the show manages to add a neat new wrinkle to Diana Maria Riva’s sardonic Detective Perez and her relationship with Jen and Judy.
The first few episodes are stressful enough that it’s a actually a relief when they completely skip over the process of the main cast disposing of a body. At that stage, the last thing the show needed was yet another scene of Judy and Jen bickering, and it’s after this that the show settles into a much more enjoyable rhythm.
Bow Bow, Chikka Chikka
It’s a rhythm that is disrupted as the finale approaches, as the show seems to hand-wave away some of the consequences of the girls actions seemingly removing some sources of tension, only to then reopen those exact same avenues for conflict for Season 3 – if it should happen.
Dead To Me, Season 2, is still an enjoyable watch and the two leads, and the rest of the cast, are still fantastic, (it’s a crime Cardellini wasn’t nominated for more awards last year) but it can’t quite match the heights of Season 1.
Dead to Me
Netflix, Season 2, 10 episodes
Showrunner: Liz Feldman
Cast: Christina Applegate, Linda Cardellini, James Marsden, Diana Maria Riva, Natalie Morales, Brandon Scott, Suzy Nakamura, Sam McCarthy, Luke Roessler, and Adora Soleil Bricher
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