You’re never too old for a slumber party. On one of the very first nights of the Dead to Me Season 1 shoot, creator Liz Feldman, staff writer Kelly Hutchinson and co-lead Linda Cardellini were staying overnight in a hotel in San Pedro. Feldman and Hutchinson, who were already close friends, were just getting to know Cardellini, but they got to talking, and the night just slipped away from them. “It was,” Feldman tells Tudum, “like a fun little slumber party with women in their 40s.”
The behind-the-scenes bonds of Dead to Me quickly spilled over onto the show’s set and then onto screens, for three intense, hilarious and heartbreaking seasons following the friendship between Judy Hale (Cardellini) and Jen Harding (Christina Applegate). Feldman says she only ever wants to work with people that she’d be friends with in real life, and that’s an attitude that resonated with Cardellini. “I always say, you have a finite number of days on this earth, and if I’m not spending them at home with my family, if I’m going to work, I want to be able to spend it with people that I actually care about and care about me,” she explains. Life is fleeting, which makes our relationships all the more precious — that’s something the show understands, as well.
Feldman wanted Dead to Me to be “a love letter to friendship,” and that meant wading into the grief that inevitably comes with true intimacy. “If you live long enough and love someone hard enough, you will experience loss at some point and you’re going to need some friends by your side to get you through,” Feldman explains. Having friends by her side on the show helped her tackle that idea with real depth. According to James Marsden, who plays twins Steve and Ben Wood, “[Liz] knows that when friendships blossom on set, that only sweetens and informs the on-screen relationships between characters,” he tells Tudum. It can also make the job feel pretty meta.
“As an actor, sometimes you feel like you go to set as yourself, and then you have to do this transformation where you’re something completely different and you’re having to manufacture an emotion for the role,” Marsden says. “With this experience on Dead to Me — especially the second and third seasons — those lines of reality and fiction got blurred more than I’ve ever experienced. There were so many parallels. Here we are, saying goodbye to these characters, and essentially, saying goodbye is a form of grief.”
Feldman had time to reflect on the nature of grief during the pandemic, which informed the writing of the show’s final season. The ongoing, tugging uncertainty of the situation led her to the realization that “there is an ambiguity to [grief]. You don’t get all the answers, and you never quite know when it’s coming.” Her writing was so true to the actual experience of grief that Cardellini was sucked into Judy’s journey, which reminded her of her own brushes with it. “Grief doesn’t hit you all at once,” Cardellini says. “It hits you in waves. It’s a thing that pops up in your life that reminds you of somebody or that reminds you of the feelings. The show constantly does that in its own way.”
The way that Feldman and the other Dead to Me writers remind us of the wild, unpredictable nature of grief is to fill every script with outlandish twists. It became the most exciting part of the writing process. “That is definitely the joy of this show: constantly challenging ourselves to create twists that aren’t just fantastical, but also grounded in who the characters are,” Feldman says. “They do come from some place of reality. These characters are in desperate situations, and they just want what they want. They’re trying to protect each other, and they make strange choices along the way, and those strange choices are fun to figure out.”
She had Cardellini hooked from the first time the actor read the pilot. At the very end of the first episode, Judy opens a self-storage facility door to expose a Mustang, thus revealing that she played a role in killing her new friend Jen’s husband. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s brilliant,’ ” Cardellini says. “You really feel like Judy’s this sweet, wholesome person, and then you realize she’s got this whole other side to her, and who will that person be? What will that become? Then, here we are, three seasons later, and those two people are die-hard best friends. The whole show is a twist.”
She’s right: Judy is not the person she initially seems to be. But she isn’t a bad person, either. She’s deeply flawed and capable of making horrendous mistakes, but also fiercely compassionate and someone who tries her best to be good. She’s so full of love. She’s complicated — Judy comes, just as Feldman said, from “a place of reality.” And her friendship with the equally complex Jen mirrors Cardellini’s real-life friendship with Applegate, Feldman, and the rest of the team that brought Dead to Me to life.
Just as love and grief are intrinsically linked, so are the real experiences that occurred behind the scenes of Dead to Me and the fictional ones that unfold as we watch it. And, just like with Jen and Judy, it all started with a connection sparked between some women in their 40s.
Dead to Me is streaming on Netflix now.
