I Didn't Think 'Dead to Me' Needed a Second Season. I Was Wrong.
Secrets are a complicated business, and Dead to Me is full of them. What do you do with a floating dead body? Can you ever truly love someone who's irreparably hurt you? What the hell is orange wine? Those are some of the questions that plague Dead to Me, and in a lesser series, it might drown the show entirely. Shows about secrets are notoriously hard to manage—perhaps harder than real life secrets.
But Netflix's Dead to Me, which returns for Season Two this week, is not just a show about secrets. It's a murder mystery and a dark comedy and a meditation on grief and a buddy adventure drama. But when you try and define the series by one of those singular monikers, it takes away from the greater good, so let's settle on this: Netflix's murder-mystery-dark-comedy-buddy-drama is a damn good time.
Season Two picks up almost exactly where Season One left off. Steve (James Marsden), who viewers last saw bleeding out in a pool after an altercation with Jen (Christina Applegate), is still presumably floating in that gorgeous upper middle-class in-ground. Steve's manically wonderful ex-fiancée, Judy (Linda Cardellini) had her suicide plans thwarted after Jen calls her for help. Judy has returned to support Jen in her time of need, and Jen is really in need right now because no amount of chlorine can mask the guilt of watching someone die (or the stench of waterlogged flesh, for the record). No one knows that grief better Judy.
From there, the season takes off, unfolding a series of events that send Jen and Judy down a dangerous path to hide the aftermath of last season's bloody finale. While digesting the conclusion of Season One last year, I said the show was best to be left as is, with a cliffhanger ending and a succinct 10-episode meditation on grief. We didn't need a second season, I said. I was wrong. A new murder doesn't open a new chapter; it dives deeper into the psyche of this dysfunctional duo. A whole season dedicated to Steve's death sounds incredibly messy, if not redundant, on paper, but that's where Liz Feldman's Netflix series subverts expectations. A significant portion of the season does hinge on the fact that Steve has been killed, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the death is important as much as what the death dredges up within its characters. Steve, played to a sinister fault by Marsden, is a surprising departure, but what his death reveals is more satisfying than any plot point unturned for the character. Similar to Season One, this season uses the pivotal finale moment to explore the intricacies of grief and trauma, shining a light on how exactly humans work after scars becomes more scarred and past damage becomes more chaotic.
And that's what makes the series so compelling because, in short, the deaths of Jen's husband and Steve are simply catalysts for bigger conversations: viewers will remember the image of Steve floating in the pool, but that murder is not what makes the 30-minute episodes so bingeable. You want to see how these women manage a grief that isn't particularly of their own doing. The performances from Applegate and Cardellini continue to capture the heart of the series. Applegate's rigid Jen has become more unhinged in Season Two. Watching her explore the wider emotional range of this darkly hilarious character is one of the best pieces of television chewing gum this year.
Feldman and the crew behind Dead to Me also give Cardellini a ton more to do this season. Once a manic-pixie-nightmare-mess, Judy becomes a fully rounded character in Season Two, and her delusional optimism is cracked open a bit. Paired together, the two actresses lead an expanding cast (no spoilers, but the rundown of new and returning characters has all the absurdity of a telenovela while somehow staying grounded... a real dip n dots of cast line ups.) in a series whose thoughtful undertones have shifted a bit from grief to trauma. Underneath every morbid joke and unwieldy use of the word "fuck," is a conversation about how the human spirit operates when beaten with tragedy, self-doubt, and betrayal. The discussion is a lot more fun because there's a dead body that drives the discussion, but there's dead bodies all over television. Few series understand that the body is only a prop, not the plot itself.
Because Dead to Me is, in part, a show about secrets, Feldman and her team continue to deliver bigger, flashier surprises. There's at least one big reveal in the first episode alone that will ensure you don't stop watching until the ten-episode season is complete, but the secrets aren't ever as good as the messages bubbling just underneath the surface. Dead to Me realizes that the power is not in the secrets whispered to the viewer, but what that secret speaks to in a character's heart. As long as the series remembers that, it's going to thrive for seasons to come.
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