The Stop Button
blogging by Andrew Wickliffe
Category: Dead to Me
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How’s “Dead to Me” going to finish up its second season? How’s it going to resolve all the dangerous situations its characters have put themselves in? With one deus ex machina after another. One could say it’s lazy, but given how hard the show tried to be more than an easy black comedy the first…
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The episode opens with some post-morning sex freaking out for Christina Applegate while Linda Cardellini is off to the big house. The show’s real cheap about the Cardellini thing, making me think I missed something in the previous episode, but she’s really there to see mom Katey Sagal, who’s not dead, but in prison. Again.…
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So, funny thing about this season. The cops seem to have forgotten anyone hit Christina Applegate’s husband with a car and drove away. Like. When Diana Maria Riva is recapping her involvement with Applegate and Linda Cardellini for Natalie Morales? Doesn’t come up. It’s very strange. Though, I guess makes sense given where the show’s…
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Wow, more of the, no, really, you like Christina Applegate and Sam McCarthy as a mother-son comedic pair. He’s quietly sullen and she’s loudly obscene. Please laugh. McCarthy is a leech on this season, frankly. Thanks to Natalie Morales and new James Marsden, “Dead to Me” has a new lease on life—is that a no…
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So, first things first. Let’s get the negative out of the way; Elizabeth Allen Rosenbaum does a poor job of directing. Not quite as bad as a first season episode, but definitely a return to the bad frame composition to cover for some of the actors not being very good. Like Sam McCarthy; I noticed…
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Rat murderer John Ennis is back for the first season, which starts this “Dead to Me” out on a high point. The only time it really weakens from there is when Suzy Nakamara and Sam McCarthy show up. Annoying neighbor Nakamara feels like a leftover bad idea from season one; she’s just there to let…
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Much like the season premiere, this episode takes place an indeterminate time from the previous episode’s cliffhanger and skips over what theoretically should be some very interesting scenes as Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini have now committed federal crimes by digging up a national forest to hide their other crime. Crimes. But it makes Applegate…
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Not only is the writing better this season—Cara DiPaolo this episode—but the direction is a major improvement as well. Tamra Davis directs this episode (Liza Johnson did the first two) and Davis has a whole bunch of experience. No more stupid portentous angles this season. I imagine the notes on “Dead to Me,” based on…
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How’s “Dead to Me” going to keep James Marsden in the cast when his character, Steve, has apparently absconded to Mexico following Linda Cardellini turning him in for money laundering? Well, luckily the creators of “Dead to Me” have seen “The Book Group” too, and James Marsden has a twin brother—Ben—and he gives Christina Applegate…
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Maybe the first half of the episode is following up from last season’s cliffhanger. The second half of the episode is then trying to get “Dead to Me” to a place where the show can go on. There’s been a seismic change to the relationship between Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini, a seismic cast change—or…
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This season finale is a trip. And not in a good way. Though I guess Geeta Patel directing probably saves it from being any worse, no matter how insipid writers Liz Feldman and Abe Sylvia’s plot points get. Like when forty-one year-old Linda Cardellini, who’s all spiritual and worked in a retirement communities for however…
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I’m curious about “Dead to Me”’s writers’ room. Did they talk about how Sam McCarthy stole a handgun, brought it to school, sold drugs, yet is totally back to petulant White teenager with no consequences this episode or did they just think… well, petulant White teenager, of course there aren’t consequences. Because when McCarthy decides…
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Early on in the episode, there’s this shot looking through the skylight at Judy (Linda Cardellini) after she’s had a fainting sell and friends Christina Applegate and Brandon Scott have brought her home. They were out investigating the list of 1966 Mustang owners Scott procured (Applegate’s husband was run down by a 1966 Mustang). It’s…
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In a somewhat incredible turn, the episode opens with Christina Applegate and investigator—I guess—Brandon Scott going to cop Diana Maria Riva and telling her about the evidence they found. Riva doesn’t seem to care much about the evidence and seems ready to throw it away; it’s incredible Applegate doesn’t ask to speak to her manager.…
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After Christina Applegate opens the episode self-identifying as an atheist, I guess I turned on the religiosity radar. Or did I? Because the Christian imagery is everywhere this episode. Woo-loving spiritual White lady Linda Cardellini takes the cross she and Applegate find at the dead husband’s accident site and puts it up in her bedroom.…
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This episode’s set an indeterminate time since the previous, with Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini poolside in Palm Springs, taking it easy. Except they’re on a retreat with their grief group—the one other group members we see in the episode are the leader, Pastor Wayne (Keong Sim) and Telma Hopkins. Cardellini and Applegate aren’t going…
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James Marsden’s character loses all appeal when—in the morning after scene with he and Linda Cardellini—he starts listening to his white man self-actualization podcast. Then he does his workout on the trampoline and you wonder just how Marsden came up with his characterization. Did he get to see the whole series script with all the…
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Even more secrets! Not only does Christina Applegate find out something she didn’t know—and not Linda Cardellini’s secret, even though Cardellini puts her secret out into the world in the form of a confession in a balloon—to send up to Heaven to Applegate’s dead husband, along with the family (it’s his birthday), which the show…
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Oh, the secrets. So many secrets. Linda Cardellini has secrets from Christina Applegate—the scene where Applegate tells Cardellini she’s a saint and Cardellini says something like, “you’ll come to find out I’m the Devil,” is a little too on the nose. But then the show has its secrets too. Creator and writer Liz Feldman wants…
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The currently strangest thing, one episode into “Dead To Me”—not counting director Amy York Rubin’s pointlessly pensive shot composition, which just distracts in a thirty minute “sitcom”—is how the show handles the humor. Outside the cold open, which has lead Christina Applegate short with neighbor Suzy Nakamura (Applegate’s husband has died and Nakamura is bringing…
The Stop Button 