How Christina Applegate saves new ‘Dead to Me’
The second season of “Dead to Me” has too much of everything.
Except Christina Applegate. Too much of her performance in this series, about two women whose codependence is built on various murders of husbands and boyfriends, current or former, is impossible. She’s an angry, hurt widow whose grieving never stands in the way of Applegate’s masterful comic timing and delivery.
She’s fantastic.
OK, the show could use a little more of Max Jenkins, but that’s nit-picking.
In case you missed the first season — spoiler alert, I guess — Jen Harding (Applegate) recently lost her husband in a hit-and-run accident. She meets
Judy Hale (Linda Cardellini) at a grief support group; Judy recently lost her fiancé.
By the end of the first episode all of this is thrown on its ear. We learn in the last scene of of the first episode of the show that Judy was involved in Jen’s husband’s death. Meanwhile she and Jen become closer, and Judy’s not actually dead fiancé Steve Wood (James Marsden) comes back into the picture.
The intricacies of the relationships, along with the often ludicrous plot twists, are what make up the first season.
And the second.
It’s impossible to say much about what happens in the new season without revealing too much. The twists are part of the fun of “Dead to Me.” Fun, that is, until, like a merry-go-round spinning too fast, they start to make you queasy. New characters are introduced this season that could illustrate a chapter in the TV-cliches-to-avoid handbook.
One particular new character’s performance rescues it a bit, but not entirely. There are several developments that make you groan, they’re so far-fetched, and more handy coincidences than the story can support.
Happily, there’s not a bad performance in the show. Cardellini is really good in a difficult role — a needy flake who wants to please everyone. Sam McCarthy is also terrific as Charlie, Jen’s oldest son, who understandably struggles with the loss of his father, as well as the mind-bending weirdness going on around him.
Diana Maria Riva’s return as Det. Ana Perez is welcome, and I love Brandon Scott as police officer Nick Prager, although in truth I’d love it more if we saw more of him. The addition of Natalie Morales as the daughter of a new resident at the assisted-care facility where Judy works is a nice addition, though her storyline is woefully underdeveloped.
Frankly, so is Jen’s. For far too much of the middle episodes (Netflix provided all 10 of the season for review), her story doesn’t allow Applegate to cut loose. If that implies that she’s showy, she’s not. She just nails every aside, which is where her character is often most effective, where we learn how she’s really feeling. When her nosy neighbor walks up unannounced and Jen doesn’t hear her, Applegate’s line reading of, “You snuck up on me like a (expletive) Prius” made me laugh out loud.
So did an otherwise serious conversation with Judy, when Jen warns her: “We aren’t in ‘Snow White.’ We are in ‘Scarface.’”
“I’ve never seen that,” Judy replies. “Oh, me neither,” Jen says with a dismissive nod. “No girls have.”
Come for the buried bodies and the unlikely twists and turns, I guess. But definitely stick around for the performances, especially Applegate’s.