I’ll come clean to say that I do not enjoy home-buying television. Sure, the personalities are wild and the houses are extravagant, but at the end of the day, home buying is an administrative task. Maybe your realtor is a character or your spouse is demanding but once you’re in the thick of it, it’s all just paperwork. The one part of the process I find compelling is the bidding war—when prospective homeowners find themselves weighing different offers and trying to make a decision.
Such is the theme of No Good Deed, a new eight-episode comedy on Netflix. The series follows a middle-aged couple, Lydia and Paul Morgan (Lisa Kudrow and Ray Romano), who have decided to sell their home in Los Feliz, Los Angeles. The house is beloved—owned first by Paul’s parents and later where the couple raised their two children—and the Morgans must decide between different deeply thirsty buyers. There are three interested parties: a young couple, Leslie and Sarah (Abbi Jacobson and Poppy Liu), who are happily pursuing their careers as a district attorney and doctor; Dennis (O-T Fagbenle) and Carla (Teyonah Parris), a couple who met only nine months ago and are expecting their first child; and JD Campbell (Luke Wilson), a neighbor looking to sell his ultra-modern home as he faces a tanking acting career and loveless marriage with his third wife, the Gucci-hungry Margo (Lydia Cardellini).
It’s not a show about dull administrative transactions—even the coke-fueled realtor working for the Morgans ensures that no boring task occurs without some fun. It provides an oddly accurate depiction of what happens when a “dream home” goes on the market: even the best people become the worst versions of themselves. Believe me when I say that everyone in this show is insufferable. Trapped within their personal dramas while continuing to try and outbid, outpace, and outcharm the current owners, No Good Deed screams the question: What lengths will you go to own a pile of bricks and sticks?
At the heart of the show is the 1920s Spanish Colonial–style house—rare in its originality and Los Angeles location—and, crucially, the traumatic events that transpired within it. Each episode strategically reveals the details of what occurred, but we learn early on that the Morgans’ son Jacob was murdered in the house. But that’s not why they want to move; Paul, a contractor, can’t afford to continue doing the type of upkeep the house requires. In the first episode, they watch on CCTV from their son’s childhood bedroom, as potential buyers wander an open house. “Let them worry about the water bill,” Paul exclaims. Lydia, still grieving her son’s death, is morose over the sale; she believes Jacob is haunting the building and communicates with her via the overhead light in his bedroom (this is a perfect role for Kudrow, whose acclaimed role as Phoebe in Friends was delightfully quirky while containing a certain sadness). Throughout the first several episodes we are led to understand why she feels guilt: the Morgans—Lydia, Paul, and Paul’s brother, Mikey (Dennis Leary)—know who killed him.
This isn’t the only nondisclosure swirling around this house; the buyers are also committed to keeping or indulging their own secrets. Sarah wants to have a child and is secretly undergoing IVF, so a family-sized house would be in order, though she’s weary of the fact that a murder occurred. Leslie, however, seems ambivalent about having a child (she doesn’t know about the IVF) and her crime-solving lawyer nature has her obsessing over what happened to Jacob. JD is faced with no real acting prospects and dwindling funds, something he hides from Margo; he wants to buy the house as a way of downsizing his expensive contemporary box down the street. Margo, on the other hand, sees the home as a viable opportunity for a developer (Kate Moenning), with whom she’s having an affair.
For prospective buyers Dennis and Carla, both are keeping details about their lives from each other, perhaps unsurprising considering they “got pregnant after four dates and married on the sixth.” Yet they are charmed by the house; they don’t love the price tag, so Dennis’s overbearing mother promises to help them pay for it, given that she’s allowed to live with them. For the couple, the house in Los Feliz presses Carla’s tolerance for her new husband’s somewhat creepy attachment to his mother. Will she bend her own boundaries and suffer under their mom-son dynamic to have their dream house?
If your attention is drawn from your screen to your phone at any point in this series, you’re guaranteed to miss something. Murder, sarcoidosis, despair, and the Citizen app are very much present and central to the comedy of it all. Jacobson shines as a character who would do anything to be in the running for the house; though she’s (rightfully) enraged when she finds out Sarah is pregnant, she immediately leverages the “good news” in a final plea to get the home. “It would mean everything to us if we could raise our child in your home,” she tells Lydia. When that fails, she tries to use her clout as an attorney to convince an unfazed Lydia that she can find out who killed her son. Lydia slams the door in their faces.
Over the subsequent episodes, antics swirl as the Morgans try to keep their secret, and the prospective buyers continue their wooing. The show effectively evolves from a home-buying comedy into a “whodunnit” dramedy—by Episode 5, we are less concerned about the buyers’ secrets and more with their fantasies. We come to understand that JD’s real motivation behind pursuing the house is to escape back to his hometown of Possum’s Hollow (where a possum is an elected official), a return to his simple upbringing without the weight of a gold-digging wife. Dennis is committed to the Los Feliz house not because he wants to live with his mother again, but because he’s convinced he will soon die as his father did in his late thirties. The house becomes a means to replicate his own upbringing, raised by a devoted single mother.
All of this is understandable. After all, a house is where we raise children, where we spend more than half of our time, and an object that builds intergenerational wealth. Contrarily, revisiting a show like Property Wars—a short-lived, 2012 Discovery reality series where investors try to outbid one another on Phoenix homes without ever having gone inside—feels bone-chilling today. Not only is it a time capsule for the Great Recession and all the resulting foreclosures, but the show effectively reduces a house to a commodifiable object. The Morgans don’t want to sell to a developer but are trapped between a very real prospect of financial ruin, and the equally-real sentimentality of having lived in their house. By focusing on the intimate and sometimes-banal interior dramas of each buyer, the bidding war in No Good Deed becomes not just about making an offer on a dream home, but the dream itself.
Without spoiling the ending, I will say that the “right” people end up with the Morgans’ home, though there are, ultimately, more winners than losers. And that’s what makes this show particularly endearing: The individuals looking to buy are relentlessly motivated by the type of life they desire, and much like the home buying experience, it is about letting go. The house for sale loses its grip on those trapped by its gravitational pull as buyers are jolted out of their respective fantasies. There are no ah-ha moments or big gestures, only the realization that buying a house can change your material reality, certainly, but it’s not going to manifest any radical vision for your future. Whether you’re in the thick of it, or coming out the other side, it’s all just paperwork.
Top photo courtesy of Netflix © 2024.
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