In the world of real estate, a building often goes to the highest bidder in a world of survival of the fittest, but things change when a coveted house might hold some dark secrets that its sellers want to outrun.
Liz Feldman’s new Netflix series follows four couples total as the story centers around Paul and Lydia Morgan, played by Ray Romano and Lisa Kudrow, who want to sell their gorgeous house to move on from past trauma. Three pairs of people take intense interest in the house, but between the truth behind what happened there three years ago and various secrets the three couples — JD Campbell (Luke Wilson) and Margo Starling (Linda Cardellini), Dennis Sampson (O-T Fagbenle) and Carla Owens (Teyonah Parris) and Leslie Fisher (Abbi Jacobson) and Sarah Weber (Poppy Liu) — have of their own, the prospective buyer status changes, sometimes by the episode.
The idea for her new Netflix series No Good Deed came to creator Liz Feldman (Dead To Me) during the pandemic.
“We were all locked down inside our homes, and suddenly our houses took on all this extra importance. It wasn’t just where we slept at night and had our breakfast in the morning. It’s also literally the only place we were safe.” Feldman told Deadline. “It really made me start thinking about home and how it is something that we project so much onto. It really is just a structure with a bunch of walls and, you know, maybe, maybe some nice bricks, but, especially during the pandemic, our homes became our everything. To be able to look at other real estate became like a vacation.”
As an escape at night, Feldman would “doom surf Zillow,” and she and her wife ended up looking for a new house of their own. They saw over 50 houses.
Each open house visit brought Feldman to appreciate all of the “history, love and loss” in the buildings, and she found that during COVID, “people were selling for sometimes really sad reasons.” One house in particular, which had just been redone was owned by a musician in the Philharmonic who could no longer afford the mortgage because they hadn’t worked during the pandemic, which is very similar to Lisa Kudrow’s character Lydia Morgan’s story in the series.
This all culminated in Feldman trying her hand at a “narrative show about the buying and selling of a house” versus all the beloved reality real estate television shows. In the below interview, Feldman explains her incorporation of the house into the series as its own character, unpacks how the show’s central mystery unfolds and shares hopes for a Season 2 of the series with Netflix.
DEADLINE: How does the house play a role in all the eight episodes of No Good Deed?
FELDMAN: I was interested, from the very conception of the show, in showing the innards of the house, showing the ugly insides. Even the most beautiful houses, if you stripped away the drywall and the paint, it wouldn’t be so pretty, and there’s such a clear metaphor there that felt too interesting to resist. I talked a lot about this motif with my producing director, Silver Tree, and she and I found places within the story that felt organic to take a trip through the house and through the underbelly and the organs, if you will.
The house itself is a complete invention. The facade is a real house in Los Angeles, but our production designer, Nina Ruscio completely manufactured, designed and built this house that you see. It is a real house that was built on two different stages. The first floor is on one stage, the second floor is on another, but all of the rooms intertwine. It all flows together like a real house. And when you would step on that stage, you would immediately feel like you were in someone’s home. That felt really important to silver and I in terms of establishing this vibe, but also being able to sort of cast the house exactly as we imagined it because it really is a character.
DEADLINE: You’ve worked with Linda Cardellini before on Dead To Me. How did it come about that she would work with you again on this series?
FELDMAN: So we were actually shooting the third season of Dead To Me, final season during the pandemic. And I had just started thinking of this idea of this show about the buying and selling of a house, and we were on set one day, and at this point we’re in year four or five of Linda playing Judy, who’s this incredibly kind and selfless, slightly doormat person, you know? And she was like, Ugh, you know what? The next thing I do, I just want to play a badass bitch. And I thought, “Well, that’s interesting.” I love Linda, and we have a wonderful working relationship, and we’ve become dear friends over the years. I thought “Maybe there’s something there.” And I just started meditating on what that would be, and who that person is in Los Angeles, that was this badass bitch revolving around this house for sale. So that’s sort of how her character came to be. She inspired it. I didn’t know she would ultimately end up playing it. I hoped she would. I certainly wrote it with her in mind, but luckily, the stars aligned and our schedules worked out and she was able to do it because she absolutely nailed it.
DEADLINE: What’s the deal with Margo’s (Cardellini) pink piano? It’s such a contrast to the one that Lydia (Lisa Kudrow) owns.
FELDMAN: I mean exactly that. It’s a physical manifestation of just how incredibly different these two women are, yeah, and not just their taste levels, but Lydia’s house, she has this incredibly beautiful and soulful antique piano that has been handed down to her from her grandmother, who survived the Holocaust. You can’t get sort of deeper than that, and then you have this ridiculous sort of Satine pink piano in Margot’s house, but she just thought was cool.
DEADLINE: You’ve mentioned loss as a theme, and it shows up within’ each of the four pairs of people who take center stage in this series. Can you talk more about that theme and how it ties the show together?
FELDMAN: I didn’t necessarily set out to make another show that explored grief, but I inadvertently did, because I think inherent to life is loss. If you live long enough, sadly, you’re going to lose something that’s of great value to you, either sentimental or financial or emotional, physical, and it felt like it was an important juxtaposition to explore in this story that could have been sort of a pretty surfacey exploration of buying the perfect house. But there’s always a reason emotionally why we want something so badly. And for some characters, it is more material, but for most of the characters, it’s really about filling something inside of them that feels empty because of a loss.
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