‘DEAD TO ME’ ENTERS ITS BITTERSWEET LAST STAGE OF GRIEF
The series excels in depiction of two women who become each other’s chosen family
When Dead to Me premiered in the spring of 2019, it set viewers up for one shocking reveal after another. The Netflix dark comedy wasn’t exactly honest with us when it introduced Jen Harding (Christina Applegate) and Judy Hale (Linda Cardellini) as two grieving women who form an unlikely bond after meeting at a bereavement support group.
Jen, cynical and jaded, is reeling from the sudden death of her husband, Ted, in a hit-and-run accident. Judy, bubbly and free-spirited, is grieving several painful losses herself, but the story she shares — about her fiance, Steve, dying of a heart attack — is a doozy of a lie. Jen and Judy connect over Facts of Life reruns, Entenmann’s cookies and TV’s go-to wellness treatment for White women over 40: beverages.
Their friendship endures following the series’ first big reveal — that Steve (James Marsden) is very much alive — and deepens in the episodes leading up to Judy’s confession that she was driving the 1966 Mustang that killed Ted. Dead to Me required viewers to suspend disbelief enough to buy that a woman would continue to be friends with someone she knows played a part in killing her husband, but even in those early episodes, it was clear that Jen and Judy were meant to be in each other’s orbit. Their entangled lives became the show’s inexorable truth as the fallout from the fatal hit-and-run grew more complicated and Season 1 ended with Steve’s bloody body in a pool. Season 2 upped the drama ante, introducing Steve’s “semi-identical” twin Ben (played to goofball heights by Marsden) as a love interest for Jen.
FOCUS ON CENTRAL BONDS
Grief remains an achingly central theme in the third season of the show, which picks up just moments after Season 2’s cliffhanger ending: the scary car accident Jen and Judy get into after Ben, off the wagon after years of sobriety, swerves into Jen’s car at a dangerous intersection. As with previous seasons, it’s hard to describe much (or any) of the plot without giving away the twists, but the dramedy’s final 10 episodes find Jen and Judy juggling life — messy and confounding as ever — while trying to conceal their roles in the active murder investigation still surrounding Steve’s death.
The series, from creator Liz Feldman, excels in its depiction of two dynamic women who become each other’s chosen family. Their complex and intense relationship has always been the best part of Dead to Me, anchored by Emmynominated performances from Applegate and Cardellini.
In between Jen and Judy’s uniquely foul-mouthed banter and their murderous schemes, the show has explored more true-to-life issues such as the emotional abuse that Judy comes to term with following Steve’s death and Jen’s pain surrounding intimacy issues she and Ted had following her preventive double mastectomy.
Applegate, a breast cancer survivor who underwent the surgery in 2008, urged Feldman to incorporate her personal experience. “[The surgery] is an incredibly painful thing to go through. It’s an amputation of a part of you,” Applegate told the Hollywood Reporter in 2019. “It’s part of being a woman, and I wanted to be honest. So I brought it to Liz and she was like, “OK, let me see how we can weave this in.” I think she did it beautifully.”
Other sobering storylines have revolved around Judy’s struggle with infertility and Jen’s insecurities around motherhood. Though both have confessed unspeakable misdeeds to one another, the series spends a little more time this season grappling with what they owe to the other people in their lives: namely Ben, and Jen’s teenage son Charlie (Sam McCarthy). Whether it’s an adequate amount of time is up for debate; there is a certain audacity in continuing to lie to the people you love.
Dead to Me returns, as always, to grief, but it’s the cathartic and beautiful kind — the kind that stays with you, reminding you of what you lost and what it meant to your life.
— Washington Post