“Dead to Me” Season 3 Is a Bittersweet Goodbye
The third and final season of Dead To Me is an ode to the platonic love between a queer woman and her straight best friend. It’s a beautiful love story, start to finish, and each episode brought elements of murder mystery, heartbreak, and so, so much laughter. Seriously, this is one of the funniest shows I’ve ever seen.
(This review contains mild-to-moderate spoilers in the first half, and major spoilers after the next warning. I’m writing under the assumption you’re probably not reading a review of a third season of a show unless you’ve seen it and want to compare opinions!)
This season was a long, bittersweet goodbye to the show, and to Jen, Judy, and the friendship we’ve grown to love over the years. Christina Applegate and Linda Cardelinni acted their butts off, and the show accommodated Christina Applegate’s MS diagnosis by having Judy sitting or leaning in most scenes, without making a big deal about, which I found very lovely.
Christina Applegate has talked about how supportive the production team (and Linda) was about this and I love this so much, especially in a time where accommodations that were lifechanging for disabled people are starting to be pulled back in a harmful way as people decide to pretend the pandemic is over.
Despite everything they’ve been through together, at the end of the day, Jen and Judy show up for each other. This season showed the growth Jen has experienced since season one; she started this show an angry widow who had little to no time for the perky weirdo infiltrating her life. And she ended it selflessly caring for that very same woman. Judy spent her life not being loved as well as she deserved to be loved, but this season showed she finally, finally was.
(This is neither here nor there but I didn’t really put together that Katey Sagal has now played both women’s mother until she was standing face to face with Christina Applegate and Judy was like, “Do I know you?”)
Okay we’re entering major spoilerville now. Continue at your own risk.
Ride or die.
At first I was upset when Judy got diagnosed with stage 4 cancer and it was clear to me that we were going to lose her by the end of the season. (Not for Bury Your Gays reason. I firmly believe there is nuance to that rule. It does’t mean “no queers die ever” it means “don’t kill off your only gay character because you ran out of ideas for her and then continue on the show without any queerness so you can check a box without having to actually do the work.” A queer character dying in the last episode of a series after rich character development, and having that death impact the entire world of the show is not the same.)
But the truth is, I understand now. Judy and Jen got away with murder, quite literally. They committed crime after crime and they were getting away with it — granted, by the skin of their teeth — time and time again. And actions have consequences, even if they aren’t obvious. Judy spent the past year focusing on everyone but herself. Covering up crimes, burying bodies, trying to atone for her part in Jen’s husband’s death, and the lies she told. She knew she had an abnormal pap smear, but she ignored it in favor of trying to help Jen get her life together. She forgot to put on her own oxygen mask before she helped others put on theirs.
I wish she had been able to be there for Jen and her family longer. Help raise the new baby as a third parent and platonic life partner to Jen, a second mom to her kids. But maybe she never would have been able to live her own life. So in the end, she got to make a choice for herself. To stand up for what she wanted, to put herself first. And there’s something beautiful about that.
Although neither Jen nor Judy were particularly focused on romance this season, they both had their moments. For Judy, that meant reuniting and reconciling with Natalie Morales‘s Michelle. They have a gay old time; Michelle gives Judy a tarot reading, and they decide to skip the mature conversation part of making up and jump right into some no-strings sexytimes.
I love them, your honor.
Michelle is actually the first person Judy tells she’s sick, and her (eventual) support makes her brave enough to finally tell Jen.
Michelle is moving to Sonoma to open her own restaurant, and Judy actually clings to the myth that she’s moving with her in lieu of telling people she’s sick for a long time. The fantasy of a happily ever after with Michelle keeps her smiling as things start to get hard.
The show could have easily just not brought her back, so I’m glad they did. Another random little gay moment I loved was when Jen and Judy end up on the beach in Mexico, and they have this cute little exchange:
Judy: We’re here!
Jen: You’re queer!
Judy: And you’re used to it.
I don’t have many straight friends at this point in my life, but the ones I do are the ones who can make jokes like this. The ones who aren’t afraid of the word “queer” because they know I use it to describe myself, the ones who know how to make a joke about queerness without making queerness the butt of the joke. The non-performative ally. And that’s exactly what Jen is for Judy.
This show is genuinely so hilarious 90% of the time but the way this series finale made me SOB was borderline emotional abuse.
Of course, it’s always hard to lose a queer character, both in the dying sense and in the show-is-over sense, but Judy was a gift from start to finish, and her relationship with Michelle was perfectly imperfect. There was something so natural about Jen and Judy’s relationship, even when (or maybe especially when) they were at odds. Judy’s relentless optimism and Jen’s persistent pessimism somehow fit together like perfect puzzle pieces, evening each other out to keep them both grounded in reality. The hard truth of the world is, sometimes even the best relationships end. Whether time takes its toll, physical distance creates emotional distance, or tragedy strikes, friends can be separated irreparably. But the friendship? The love you felt for them, the impact they had on you…that never has to go away. You can find it in your favorite show, a paper crane, a dash more optimism than you used to have, the cupcake recipe you use. Maybe it’s just memories now, but that doesn’t make it any less real.
As a single lesbian of a certain age (or nearing it, at least), I appreciated Judy as an older queer woman for whom dating wasn’t a priority. In fact, while dating and love happened to Judy and Jen, their romantic entanglements were not ever the point. The number one love story in this show was the platonic love between Judy and Jen, and I think that’s beautiful. Some shows would have tried to cross that line, would have had it seem like Judy was pining over her straight best friend, or have Jen worried that would happen. But that line was never crossed, nor was it ever a question. Some shows are somehow bad at knowing what female friendship is really like, and sometimes shows accidentally make the main female friendship too shippable. I don’t know if the fault lies in actors, writers, or directors at that point, but it’s always confusing to me. But even when Judy is doing things like baking birthday cupcakes for Jen’s son, or when Jen and Judy are curled up in bed watching the The Facts of Life, it’s always deeply platonic in the most beautiful way possible. I don’t have a sister, so I don’t know if that’s how it feels to have a sister, so to me it just reads as a deep and wonderful friendship. A friendship between two adult women that is complicated and important and special and so, so full of love. A friendship that looks more like what my friendships look like. A friendship I want to see more of on TV.
Season 2 of “Dead to Me” Is Flirting With You Via Natalie Morales
Warning: Medium-to-large spoilers for Dead to Me seasons one and two comin’ at ya.
“You like her.” “I do.”
Five small words. On paper, nothing special. But in the context of the second season of Dead to Me? Game-changing.
But let me back up a little. I watched the first season of Dead to Me two days before the release of the second season. I was just looking for something to put on while I worked, and Netflix had bumped it up to the top of my home screen because of the upcoming new episodes. For reasons I do not understand, no one I knew had ever tried to talk to me about the show. I did my traditional quick search on Autostraddle and nothing turned up, so I knew it wasn’t going to be gay. And since the episodes were 30 minutes long and the snippet Netflix showed me when I rolled over the title page was Christina Applegate hilariously shutting down an over-eager neighbor with dry humor, I assumed it was a sitcom of sorts.
Basically, what I’m saying is, no one prepared me for what this show was about. No one prepared me for how hilarious it was while also being deeply tragic. No one prepared me for how invested I would be in the extremely fucked up relationship between two women whose lives couldn’t be more different than mine. No one prepared me for the intricate and stunning storytelling that would unfold as puzzle pieces of a mystery started to fall into place, all while Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini made me laugh and cry and gasp and laugh some more.
A moment of peace in this chaotic world.
I finished the first season in one day. I couldn’t stop watching. These two women, Jen and Judy, were so engaging and interesting and so deeply messed up. They are open with each other in a way they aren’t with anyone else in their lives. They stay up late talking to each other; Judy eventually moves in and becomes something of a second mom to Jen’s kids. Their chemistry was off the charts, and even though I knew they weren’t going to end up together, I couldn’t help but wonder. Even Jen’s son clocked it; he would joke about them “breaking up” whenever Judy wasn’t around for a few days. But what else was he supposed to think? The majority of his experience with his mother before was a quick-to-anger, all-business woman who had been cold in the months before his father died, and all but shut down after. And here she was opening her home to a stranger, being affectionate and gentle in a way that he couldn’t quite wrap his head around. And besides, the show is created by lesbian comedian and writer Liz Feldman; surely it’s GOTTA get gay at some point.
But Jen and Judy aren’t why I’m finally able to write about this show on Autostraddle. No, their relationship is more complicated than that, and isn’t sexual at all. Again, I will reiterate that nothing about their friendship is HEALTHY. Their entire friendship was built on layer after layer of lies, and they absolutely at no point should have been in each other’s lives. In fact, it’s only through trauma bonding they still are. Judy even picked up the same bad habits she had with her abusive ex-husband and just transferred them to Jen. (In season one, Judy and Steve had this back-and-forth pattern where Steve would say something awful, Judy would scold him, he would say “Sorry” and she would respond “It’s okay” like a reflex. The same thing starts to happen with Jen eventually.) These manipulative and unhealthy relationships in equal parts mirror and are an attempt to make up for the fucked up relationship with her mother. It’s bad, bad, bad, but just because it’s fucked up and not something I’d want in real life doesn’t mean it isn’t extremely magnetic and fun to watch.
Also fun to watch? Natalie Morales. A queer actress you know and love, maybe from Parks and Rec, maybe from last summer’s bisexual pop of a sitcom, Abby’s. But I’ve never seen her quite like this.
I also had an old car that had a couch-like front seat. No one ever looked at me like this while we were in it.
She floats in like cool silk on a hot day and even though she’s looking at Linda Cardellini the whole time you somehow feel like also she’s looking at you? I’ve never seen anyone flirt like this. It’s absolutely electric. There’s one part where she’s leaning on a doorframe and I have never wanted to be a doorframe but here I was, wishing I could be a doorframe.
O, to be a doorframe, lest you rest upon me.
I also, for a while, couldn’t tell how it was going to go. I could tell Natalie Morales’s character, Michelle, was into Judy. I could tell Judy liked the attention Michelle was giving her. But I didn’t know how it was all going to shake out. Was Michelle going to make a move and scare Judy away? Was Judy going to make a big thing about her newfound feeling for another woman and it was going to be awkward and terrible? Was Judy going to try to lean into this despite not really being into it just because she likes being liked and it was all going to go down in flames? Was Jen going to flip out and try to talk Judy out of her feelings? I’ve been burned so many times that I found myself waiting to find out not whether or not it would be a good storyline, but how the storyline was going to hurt me. But then none of those fears came true. Instead Michelle and Judy flirted and flirted and got closer and closer until Jen saw the two of them interacting and turned to Judy and said, more than asked:
“You like her.”
And Judy answered with hearts in her eyes and no hesitation in her voice, like letting out a breath she’d been holding, “I do.”
It’s not the first time we, the audience, know there’s something more. There’s a point when Michelle is asking Judy about Jen while also trying to figure out if Judy is into women the way we all have had to play Nancy Drew in our lives. She asked if Judy was…not finishing the sentence. Not having to. And Judy answered, “Not with HER.” Simple. Perfect.
But this was the first time Jen learned. And Jen just smiled at Judy and said they were good together. Judy smiled and says she feels like the most herself when she’s with Michelle. And that’s the extent to which they talk about the fact that Jen had previously only known Judy to date men, and now she’s dating a woman. Two grown-ass suburban rich ladies just rolling with the queerness. It’s possible, and it’s beautiful.
Of course, because this is nothing if not a roller coaster of a show (my friend Megan described it as “fun stress”) there are plenty of other complications in their relationship, but the queer aspect of it is never the hurdle. And have I mentioned how perfect Natalie Morales is? (Also when we meet Michelle she’s living with her ex, which is such a relatable gay experience it’s not even funny. While also being hilarious.) And Natalie and Linda have a heat usually reserved for teenagers. In fact, they even stole a page from Emily Fields and Maya St. Germain’s book.
PHOTOBOOTH KISS. WE LOVE TO SEE IT.
It’s also, so far, Judy’s healthiest relationship. It’s one of the first choices we see Judy make purely for herself. Almost everything else we’ve seen her do so far was for someone else; to appease Steve, to help Jen, etc. But in that photobooth, when she leans in and kisses Michelle for the first time, that’s just for her. Because Michelle doesn’t demand anything of her, she doesn’t owe Michelle anything. Judy just wants Michelle, and Michelle wants her back, and in that moment, it’s the purest, happiest, least complicated thing in Judy’s life.
I love that this show, while being about Jen and Judy’s ex husbands in a…very specific way, is actually about their relationship with each other. In all its complicated glory. These are two women who make a lot of bad choices and continue to hurt each other and other people and yet, you can’t help but root for them. You just want them to be happy, despite all of the terrible things they’ve done. It’s a perfect show about imperfect people, and while I don’t recommend emulating any part of your life on anything that happens on this show (unless you can get Natalie Morales to flirt with you), I do highly, highly recommend watching it.