SPOILER ALERT: The following reveals major plot points for No Good Deed on Netflix.
Two out of the three couples competing for the Los Feliz house in Liz Feldman’s No Good Deed end up getting what they want by the time the finale rolls around.
Just as the layers of the house owned by Paul (Ray Romano) and Lydia Morgan (Lisa Kudrow) are peeled back by three couples very keen to move into the dwelling — 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) — secrets come to light as the process gets tangled up with the dark history of the Derby Drive home.
About midway through the series, viewers learn that Lydia and Paul’s son Jacob (Wyatt Aubrey) died in a tragic sequence of events one night after he tried to correct some of his wrongs. Jacob had been stealing objects from neighbors, and at first, it looks like Paul and Lydia’s daughter Emily (Chloe East) was responsible for his death because she grabbed a gun and shot him, thinking that he was trying to break into their house and not realizing who he was.
It turns out the real culprit was Linda Cardellini’s Margo Starling, whose real name is Luann, who shot the fatal bullet that killed Jacob. She was chasing him out of fear that he would reveal their affair, so she wanted to silence him.
“That’s something that organically grew inside the writers room. I always say, ‘I don’t need to be right for it to be good.” I want the best idea to win,” Feldman told Deadline. “Sitting there and talking about this character and the more we developed her and added layers, it just sort of fell into place that she would be the literal smoking gun, in part, because we wanted the Morgan family to be able to move on, and we wanted them to be able to absolve themselves and each other. And it felt like, to do that, there needed to be a very out-of-left-field reveal that shows that though they’ve each been blaming themselves and each other. It wasn’t their fault at all.”
Margo, or Luann, who Feldman described as a “bad*as b*itch” role that she rote with Linda Cardellini in mind, gets hers at the end of the final episode of No Good Deed when a fire engulfs the house she lives in with her husband JD Campbell (Luke Wilson), but Feldman encourages viewers who think Lydia (Kudrow) might be responsible for the conflagration to rewatch and look for other clues as to how that fire scarred half of Margo’s face. The fire also made it possible for two of the competing families to live on Derby Drive in the end, though JD and Margo do not stay with what is now a dirt lot where their home burned down. As for who ends up in the Morgans’ house, the victors of the competitive real estate bidding shifted on completion of the story.
“I didn’t initially plan on Leslie and Sarah getting the house, but you get into a writer’s room, and what happens is you sit with, in my case, six or seven incredibly talented writers, and we just start talking and pitching and thinking and building a world. And at a certain point, we really felt like we wanted to give their family a happy ending,” Feldman said. “And so, because the show was in part, inspired by my wife and I searching for a house, it felt fitting that Leslie and Sarah should get the house in the end. It also feels significant that they are the only two buyers who really know everything right about what happened, and they still choose to live there. That felt like a satisfying ending and an interesting place to land.”
Carla and Dennis landed the lot across the street from the Morgans’ old house where JD and Margo had previously lived, and Carla got to fulfill her wish of constructing their big dream house from the ground up. But Dennis will have some explaining to do about a check from Carla’s father for a million dollars, which he may or may not have repurposed as an advance for his next book, though the check was meant for their new baby boy.
“I’m really interested in getting in a room with Netflix and talking with them about what I see for Season 2,” Feldman said when asked if these seeds were deliberately planted for a potential next installment. “I have a really clear idea of what I want to do, and I really hope we get to do it.”
Though the Morgans’ time in the spotlight might now be over with their turning over of the house, the family still got a chance to come back together at the end, symbolized by Lydia taking the stage once more to play piano — which she had been struggling to do throughout the show — and accompany her daughter’s vocals at a gig. She and her daughter Emily had a tension between them throughout the series, but this eased.
“From the beginning, we wanted [Lydia] to be able to play again, and we found our way to that moment as we developed her daughter, the character of Emily, and we felt like that was the most sort of emotionally satisfying way to watch her return to herself,” Feldman said. “I was interested in giving her a version of a happy ending. Obviously, she’s not going to — spoiler — but she’s not going to be able to get her son back. She, almost in a form of self-punishment, has this physical malady that comes on that will keep her from doing the thing that she loves the most, other than her children.”
Even Paul’s big brother Mikey has a bright spot of hope in the end, though for a moment there, viewers probably thought he was dead and gone for good.
“We always intended on his character having only a momentary, um, lapse of consciousness, because I was really interested in exploring a way to bring his character to a place of healing as well,” Feldman said. “Childhood trauma affects people in very different ways, that’s something that we explore in the show. We came up with the idea that though at first, Lydia has done this truly terrible thing in a very twisted way, she actually ends up helping him, and this act of desperation and violence on her part ends upbringing him back to life because it forces him to detox and face the conflict that he has with his own son and with his brother and his past. We liked the idea that this very insane, impulsive act on Lydia’s part ends up in some way bringing her back to the thing that she feels most whole doing, which is mothering.”