'No Good Deed' Review: The Truth Shall Set Your Ghosts Free

Liz Feldman, creator of Dead To Me, has created another dark, adult dramedy that interrogates the secrets hidden behind the perfect facades of suburban homes with Netflix’s No Good Deed.

The eight-episode series is part family drama and part murder mystery, with each episode a layer of onion that is carefully peeled away until the full truth of the mystery is finally revealed. It’s a well-crafted story that makes good use of the comedic talents of its stars by restraining them with thoughtful dialogue and putting them in stressfully unfunny situations, then allowing them to find the humor in the moment. For a cast stacked with solidly funny people, there are very few, if any, laugh-out-loud moments. But life is like that sometimes, funny even when it’s not.

No Good Deed is about Paul and Lydia Morgan (Ray Romano and Lisa Kudrow), who are finally selling the beautiful California home where Paul was raised with his brother (Denis Leary) and where they raised their children three years after a tragedy.

Their home is the envy of many potential buyers, including the washed-up soap opera star across the street (Luke Wilson) and Margo, his scheming, gold-digging wife played by Dead To Me’s Linda Cardellini.

Leslie (Abbi Jacobson) and Sarah (Poppy Liu), a young(ish) lesbian couple struggling with IVF treatments, are also competing for the house against Dennis (O-T Fagbenle) and his pregnant wife Carla (Teyonah Parris). Dennis is a hardcore Mama’s Boy whose mother (Anna Maria Horsford) is all up in their business, much to Carla’s chagrin.

Also important to the story are Phyllis (Linda Lavin) the neighborhood busybody, Greg (Matt Rogers) the flamboyant real estate agent, and Margo’s lover Gwen (Kate Moennig), a ruthless real estate developer in it to flip it.

All the actors involved are at the top of their game in this one. No one is resting on their laurels or relying on old schtick. Both Leary and Romano deliver nuanced performances in their complicated and often adversarial relationship with each other and with Kudrow’s character. Grief and anxiety play large parts in all of the characters’ stories, and grief and anxiety connect them more strongly than the real estate market does. Everyone is connected in some small way or another outside of the Morgans’ house, and they all find ways to establish direct connections to the Morgans as they vie for consideration in the sale of that house.

There are no good deeds in No Good Deed. The only deed that matters is the deed to the house the Morgans want to sell. Everything that happens is a domino, and every flashback adds another domino to the line until it all comes crashing down on the Morgans, forcing them to finally confront how the tragedy in their past has been affecting their marriage and decide once and for all how to address it.

The episodes are only about half an hour long, which makes for an easy binge of the entire season in one go. Knowing the way Netflix makes decisions about the popularity of its shows, I hope everyone binges No Good Deed because the epilogue set up a potential second season with new mysteries to solve that I would be very happy to watch.

All episodes of No Good Deed are streaming now on Netflix.