Netflix's Dead to Me Gives Life to New Genre

Netflix’s Dead To Me arrived unapologetically in the wake of HBO’s Big Little Lies, but doesn’t become beholden to the shadow it is meant to exist in. Both shows are about a mysterious death in a well-off California neighborhood and focus on the stories of mothers in the wake of each show’s tragedy. Although the actors of Dead To Me are B-listers when compared to Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon, Dead To Me succeeds with its own story to tell and statement about TV in the streaming era.

The show opens with the main character learning her husband has been killed in a hit-and-run car accident. Jen (Christina Applegate) must quickly adapt to single parenthood. In the absence of his father, Jen’s oldest son Charlie (Sam McCarthy) challenges his mother’s decisions, such as her choice to invite her new friend Judy (Linda Cardelinni), who she met at a bereavement group, to live with their family.

The sudden inclusion of Judy into Jen’s family, and her son’s rightful skepticism towards the decision, shows men don’t understand how non-men cope with tragedy. Often, relationships that form during times of grief don’t fit the heteronormative mold that men ascribe to female friendships. Instead of a benign companionship engaging in performative female rituals, Jen and Judy’s friendship becomes a co-parenting partnership that establishes a new authority in the household. This shift challenges Charlie’s conception of family and triggers a display male entitlement and understandable grief.

Without his father to assert a familiar masculine form of authority, Charlie clashes with his mother and Judy, whose partnership undermines the idea that men, through their mere existence, wield an inherent amount of authority. When Jen blossoms into a capable head-of-household after her husband’s death, it becomes clear that his passing allowed for her self-actualization.

Charlie must draw this conclusion on his own and reconcile his grief for his father with the realization that his father created a repressive environment for his mother. Charlie deflects his anger at this new reality at his mother, even though the inequality that angers him benefited his father and was detrimental to her. From a child’s perspective, it’s easy to blame Jen as complicit in her own oppression. Born into the circumstance, Charlie had no agency in prolonging it until he got older.

Jen’s stoicism is foiled by the hyperactive Judy, who began their friendship by repeatedly asking for a hug. At the end of the first episode, it becomes clear that Judy killed Jen’s husband in a hit-and-run accident, and has sought her out in order to appease her guilt. Throughout the season, this dramatic irony enhances suspense and elicits sympathy for Jen, who unwittingly brings her husband’s killer into her life in a way that is impossible to disentangle.

However, the show also shows sympathy for Judy, who wins audiences with her compulsiveness, charm, and inability to let anyone go. The writers frame Judy’s intrusion into Jen’s life as a symbol of her people-pleasing personality. Even though her actions will inevitably inflict more grief on Jen, this cognitive dissonance helps audiences fall in love with her: tragically bound to help others, even at her own peril. Ultimately, Jen and Judy become a co-dependent power duo, staying in each others’ lives to help each other overcome obstacles they created.

At the end of the first season, Jen’s involvement in the death of Judy’s ex-husband cements Judy in her life. The symmetry of this plot shows that television dramas and sit-coms have birthed their first child. In dramas, the cliffhangers that proceed a subsequent season often create a new type of plot-line. For example, although seasons one and two of Stranger Things revolve around Will, season 3 shifts to an arch that follows Eleven confronting the show’s antagonist in a new way.

On the sitcom Friends, a will-they won’t-they plot concerning Ross and Rachel spans ten seasons. The symmetry of the plot of Dead to Me across seasons, with Jen being thrust into the same situation as Judy, shows that although multi-cam sit coms may be dying, their legacy lives on.

Writers and actors are able to pile more plot and theme into a short-form show due to the freedom that streaming allows for with fewer commercial breaks and the ability to binge-watch. Plucked out of commercial limbo on cable television, the sit-com isn’t just getting a face lift, but its central structure is a now a launching pad for new types of storytelling.

Valerie Mahaffey makes a valuable addition to the show as Jen’s mother-in-law, playing the archetypal judgmental figure who also shows up in Big Little Lies, played by Meryl Streep. Dead to Me may not feature as many A-listers, but the lack of celebrity helps to underscore its central message not just as a story but as a product of the streaming era.

A dark comedy that fuses opposite mediums, its mission was a long shot, and a big name would have distracted from the experimentation. Its tightly plotted formula doesn’t upstage the predecessor, but makes viewers forget that there was one. The ability of Dead to Me to isolate itself from that conversation is its greatest strength: it knows that it will never become Big Little Lies, so it bends genre in a way that makes comparison needless.

With the argument for its own existence as its central thesis, Dead to Me justifies the homogeneity and diversity that streaming simultaneously allows for.

Every revolution in entertainment will inevitably become a revolution in fluff, with imitative shows popping up in every genre and form. Dead to Me, by acknowledging its raison de’tre as a near-rip off, avoids that distinction. Its originality stems from its unique stance on its capitalistic existence. Dead to Me may deflect the attention of viewers from the fact that its an imitation, but it never tells a lie.