The third season of Dead to Me finally reveals whether Jen Harding (Christina Applegate) has to face consequences for the accidental murder of Steve Wood (James Marsden). But that’s not really the point of the final ten episodes of this off-kilter Netflix dramedy, created by Liz Feldman, who also wrote and directed its finale.
“At the end of the day, this isn’t really, in its heart of hearts, a show about crime and punishment,” Feldman says. “It is really a show about grief and friendship.” That’s apparent in nearly every scene of the last season, which zeroes in even more closely on the unlikely friendship between Applegate’s Jen and Linda Cardellini’s Judy Hale, who initially connect in season one through grief therapy. As Feldman describes it, there were layers of emotion involved in saying good-bye to this show, for her and the writing staff, which includes some of Feldman’s dearest friends, and for Cardellini and Applegate. Though it’s Judy who deals with illness during the course of the season — she’s diagnosed with stage-four cervical cancer — Applegate was the one actually grappling with a multiple-sclerosis diagnosis that came halfway through production of the season.
Dead to Me has always been about how life — and just generally crazy shit — happens while you’re making other plans, and the making of the show has followed a similar trajectory. Happily for everyone, Feldman and crew were still able to make the ending they wanted, even if it didn’t always go exactly according to the original plan.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It is also rife with spoilers.
You and I talked at the end of season two, which was 500 years ago.
Approximately, yeah.
I want to read something that you said to me then and ask you to expand on it now. You said, “I had a version of an end for season three that I’m rethinking actually, because I think it’s important to pay attention to where we are collectively as a human race and to be sensitive to the fact that our audience is living through this incredibly difficult moment in history.” This was referring, obviously, to the pandemic. Now that I’ve seen season three, I’m wondering what the original idea was and how it changed?
I would say the seed of the idea is what you saw. I just ended up telling it in a different way. It came to me in the middle of shooting season two that Jen and Judy needed to have some sort of closure that healed both of their deepest wounds. So I knew that, and I felt like, Okay, I’ve been telling this story for two seasons at that point of grief and loss and forgiveness and friendship, and I don’t want to forget that is the heart and the soul and the DNA of the show. I’m like, how do you bring closure to a show about female friendship as it pertains to going through grief and loss?
The truth is that Judy was inspired by a dear friend of mine who we lost at 38. She had a pain in her body that she wasn’t paying attention to, or that maybe she was paying attention to but not necessarily following through about. She was this ethereal, beautiful, magnanimous, angelic person who was literally the kind of person that would stop and help an old lady across the street, almost against the old lady’s will. She was just one of those people who, though she was not here for nearly long enough, just left this indelible mark. It was almost subliminal in my work of writing the show that I carried her with me. And then when I thought about how to really properly end it, she came up for me.
It was really about wanting to bring closure and healing to these two characters, Jen and Judy. By bringing them closure, hopefully I can bring the audience closure with the show because I know our incredible, devoted audience really loves these two characters as much as I do. And as difficult as it was to bring them on this journey and to tell this story, it is at the crux of why I wanted to do this show in the first place: to deal with my own grief and help people deal with theirs, and to help people come to a form of acceptance that grief is just a thing we’re all going to live through. If you live long enough to love someone enough, you will experience grief. And to maybe start looking at grief as a painful, yes, but hopefully almost beautiful reminder of the fact that you got to love someone that much.
Given that Judy was somewhat inspired by your friend, was it always in the back of your mind that she would deal with an illness and eventually die?
Not at all. I would be lying if I said I knew how I wanted the show to end when I pitched it originally to Netflix. I didn’t. I knew that I had to hire a wonderful group of writers who were more talented and had better ideas than I did, and that they would help me figure out how to get there. Because the truth is season one didn’t even end the way that I originally intended it to. One of my brilliant writers came up with the idea that Jen should kill Steve, and then that would be the ultimate Strangers on a Train kind of cosmic balance of comeuppance. He was right, and I’m so glad we did that. Because we did that, it changed everything I thought season two was going to be. And then we ended season two the way we did, and we were sort of hurtling toward that ending.
During production, I realized, oh, coming off of this massive accident that they’ve gotten into yet again, with this hit-and-run, that could be an interesting way to bring about the fact that it’s sometimes what you least expect that gets you in the end.
In terms of what ultimately ends up happening to Judy, did you and the writers try on different scenarios where maybe she gets cancer but then survives? Or once you decided to revisit the grief issues, would it not have made sense if she didn’t die?
I will say I knew that Jen and Judy would not be in the last scene together. I knew that from the very beginning. I did at some point decide that I wanted it to be — I wouldn’t use the word ambiguous, but I would say I wanted to leave it up to the audience to decide on some level what happened, because you don’t really ever see what happened. That is all very deliberate.
I knew that I didn’t want to go full Beaches. A show I loved that I think dealt with this subject matter really well, called The Big C — that show was run and created by my dear friend Darlene Hunt, and she really leaned into the death part of that story. I wanted to give you a reflection of what it feels like to go through the loss of someone, where it feels like they just took off. You’ve just been hanging out with them and they got in their car and they left, or they walked into the other room, or perhaps they jumped on a boat and floated away. For so many people that is really what it feels like because you’re not really there with the person when they go. So that’s what I was going for, but also, this is Dead to Me. So did she die?
Well, I was going to ask you that.
Well, what’s funny is I’d rather you tell me the answer.
Jen seems to feel certain that she did die. She doesn’t seem to have any doubt about it. Obviously, Judy sailing off on the boat echoes what she says happened to her “uncle or possible father.” It almost feels to me like she’s giving Jen the gift of she’s gone, but maybe she’s not. And that will allow Jen to feel Judy’s presence.
This is exactly what I want. I want people to choose their own ending in a way, because yes, this is the show about grief and loss, so regardless of what happened, Jen no longer has Judy in her life. She’s obviously not present. I’ll just say that I very specifically never said that Judy passed. Nobody talks about her death. You don’t see a funeral.
To answer your very first question, which is did I change what I was going to do because of what we all went through? Because of what we all went through, I didn’t need it to be stark. I didn’t think we needed this black-and-white, hit-you-over-the-head ending that brought you in a very confrontational way to your relationship with death. I really wanted it to be a softer landing. I think it’s actually, hopefully, a more effective way for you to come to terms with your own feelings of grief, rather than being heavy-handed about it. I wanted it to be more of an ellipsis rather than a period.
Can you walk me through how Christina’s diagnosis affected what you were planning to do, and what kind of adjustments you had to make this season?
We had already shot 50 percent of the season when she got her diagnosis. So the season was completely written, and it wasn’t really possible to rewrite at that point because we shot it entirely out of order. When I say entirely out of order, I mean our production started with all of James Marsden’s scenes. Because of all the delays from the pandemic, we were really under the gun in terms of schedules. And James, the lovely sweetheart and incredibly busy actor that he is, was like, “Here’s what I can give you and let’s try to get it all done.” So we did. He’s in eight of ten episodes, and we got all his stuff done in the first month or so of production, then we started filming the rest of the show. We had shot all ten episodes, but only pieces of it by the time Christina received her diagnosis. So we were a bit locked into that story, and also that is the story that Christina wanted to tell as much as I did. I don’t think we changed anything. It remained exactly intact to the original intention. The only thing that may have evolved was different blocking and just anything that we could do to help accommodate her.
So Jen getting pregnant was always in the story?
Yeah.
Tell me why you wanted to do that.
Again, going back to this room full of talented writers whom I trust and depend on, it wasn’t my idea. It was one of my brilliant writers, Jessi Klein, I believe, who suggested that she get pregnant because we were talking about this idea of full-circle closure. How do we bring both of these two women through all of their trauma to get to a place of healing? We had already come up with Judy’s story line in terms of her dealing with illness. And we were thinking, Okay, well, then what is the cosmic balance there? What is the yin to that yang? How do we help Judy come to a place of acceptance for this dream that she will never see realized? That’s when the idea popped up that Jen should get pregnant. At first, like many of the more out-there ideas that have been pitched on the show, I’m like, That’s crazy. We can’t do that. Then I think about it for a little bit, and then I can’t stop thinking about it.
So much of Judy’s fertility struggle comes from my own life. I had to come to a place of acceptance when I realized I wasn’t going to be able to bear a child. When you come to a place of acceptance, that doesn’t mean you’re cool with it and you’re like, glad. It just means I’ve been confronted with this truth and I can either live in resentment or I can live in acceptance. We wanted Judy to have to live in acceptance with it, and we felt the best way to do that was for Jen to get pregnant and for her to have to just accept that some people have that luck and that blessing and some people don’t. The scene where Jen tells Judy that she’s pregnant, which was obviously a very difficult conversation for that character to have with her best friend who can’t have a kid, was very much ripped from my life because my best friend got pregnant at a time when I was trying to conceive for, I don’t know, the fourth or fifth year.
It was actually the day after my 40th birthday, my cousin had passed away on my birthday. The day after, my best friend was like, I’m pregnant. And I was like, That’s amazing. Linda did it incredibly well, and I’m sure more textured and interesting than I actually did it in real life. But I truly did that. I put on this happy façade of That’s amazing, because I really was happy for her. I wasn’t lying. I maybe waited for five minutes and then I excused myself to the bathroom, and I just bawled in the bathroom. I was really happy for her and I love that child with my whole being. But I was really sad for myself, and in some ways it just helped me confront it and deal with the fact that this thing ain’t happening in the way that I wanted it to. Obviously that was many years ago, and a lot can happen in five years. And in fact, I now have a 1-month-old.
Oh, congratulations!
Thank you. So closure can come in many forms.
When Jen first finds out she’s pregnant and then she tells Judy, I was thinking that it’s going to be extra-painful for Judy to watch Jen raise this child with this guy who looks exactly like Judy’s ex. But she is spared that, which, you don’t want to call that a blessing, but in that sense, at least, it kind of is. Was that in your head when you were writing this?
I think we were definitely swirling around all of the insane complications that this would bring into both of their lives. From the moment Ben and Jen become a romantic partnership, that is weird for Judy too. Just the fact that she’s looking at the same face but that person is now with her best friend. These are the things that are really fun to write. In some ways, it’s heightened. Maybe there are more layers of dramatic irony than life sometimes has, but not always. Sometimes life is so crazy and weird shit happens that you’re like, If I wrote this nobody would believe me.
To go back to how you made adjustments this season, a recent New York Times piece suggested that one option was to just scrap the third season entirely. Was that a real possibility at any point?
I think it was a real possibility to walk away from it. It was more than a real possibility. I and our partners at the studio and at Netflix were willing to do anything that would help Christina, that would take the pressure off of her, anything that she needed in terms of support. Christina and I are very close and we are a real creative partnership. I was like, You don’t need to do this for me. It’s okay. We have two beautiful seasons of television I’m really proud of and if that’s it, wonderful.
I just cared about her first and foremost as a human being. Let’s not think about this as work. Who cares? It’s a TV show. This is your life. Christina really wanted to finish — she wanted to give the audience closure and to tell this story as we wanted it to be told. It was all Christina, and I’m very grateful.
The scenes where Judy’s going through chemotherapy felt like they were written by people who either had gone through it or know people who did.
That’s one of the things about that illness is that everybody knows somebody who has gone through it, for better or worse. I have several writers who lived through it very recently and personally, so it was really important to us to get it right. It’s sort of the same thing as I was saying with, if you’ve lived long enough, you’ve loved someone who’s passed away. If you’ve lived long enough, you know somebody who had cancer. Cancer hit really close to home for a lot of different people on the show. My own mother was diagnosed with cancer during the production of season three.
I’m sorry. It feels like when something difficult is happening to you, there are ten difficult things happening simultaneously.
You have no idea. Okay, I’m going to just describe one week to you. In this one week, starting on a Monday, my best friend’s house burned down three days after she bought it.
Oh my God.
Literally she got the keys on a Friday, her house burned down on Monday. Two hours later, I found out my wife was pregnant. Two days later, my mother was diagnosed with cancer. That’s just a week in the life of a Dead to Me writer, what can I tell you?
But yeah, cancer hit really close to home for a lot of people who were really closely associated with the show. I reached out to a personal friend who had just gone through chemo, and I made sure that we got every detail right. I asked her, “What do you wish people knew about?” And she told me about the cold cap. Shout out to Jessica St. Clair for helping me write that in an authentic way, and helping Kelly Hutchinson and Jessi Klein, who co-wrote that episode. She was an adviser to me about just how to approach the subject. I had never heard of a cold cap. I didn’t even know it existed. She’s like, “Please talk about that so that people know that it’s out there and that it’s an option.”
We had multiple oncologists, we had a chemo technician on set, just really making sure that everything was accurate. Even though this is a show where a lot of things can be heightened, anything that is human and interpersonal, I always want it to be real.
I have a few questions about the ending of the show. We learn that Jen gets off the hook for killing Steve because Agent Moranis gets killed and the cops seem to think the Greek mafia was responsible for both murders. Did you and the writers think about multiple scenarios for how Jen might avoid prosecution?
Not to just be annoying and not answer your question, but truly I felt that I led with the best version of what we came up with. But of course we discussed, well, what if Jen does have to pay the price? What if she is implicated? What if she does strike a plea? We went down every single possible road. But at the end of the day, this isn’t really, in its heart of hearts, a show about crime and punishment. It is really a show about grief and friendship, so that always informs the storytelling.
To that point, there’s a really beautiful scene where Jen and Judy say good-bye to each other. It made me cry. I’m wondering how it was for you to write it and then how it was for Linda and Christina to perform. I’ve got to assume that there were layers of real emotion mixed with the performance for both of them.
Oh my gosh, yes. The writing process is very collaborative on a TV show. My name is on the episode, but I had a lot of help in writing it, and specifically that scene because we really wanted to get it right. We wanted it to have that impact and for it to say a lot without saying a lot. I got a lot of help from Kelly Hutchinson, who’s one of my best friends in real life, and from Cara DiPaolo, who’s a writer on season two and season three. When we were shooting that scene — first of all, when we table-read the scene perhaps six months earlier, nobody could even get through it. Even on a Zoom table read of 50 people, just tears in every little box, including my little box. We knew that was going to be an incredibly difficult scene for the ladies to get through and for us to get through, so that is the very last scene that we shot.
I have this very visceral memory of standing there with Kelly, who’s been around all three seasons, was my roommate in college, and one of my best friends since I’m 18 years old. So much of Jen and Judy is really inspired by our friendship. We were just standing there at the monitor, arm and arm. It felt like there was sort of a scene happening on top of a scene. It was really those ladies saying good-bye, but it was the characters also, because Christina and Jen are so close at this point, and Linda and Judy are so close at this point, I really don’t know where the person begins and the character ends. They are just so in the bones of their characters. There wasn’t one bad take of it.
It was so cathartic, but so emotional every time they went through it that I actually was like, Look, we have it in the can. We’ve got it. And they looked at each other and they looked back at me and they were like, Can we do it one more time? They just didn’t want to say good-bye. So the very last time they did it, I’m standing there arm in arm with Kelly, and they’re crying and we’re crying. I turn around and every single person on the crew is crying. Every single person. It was just beautiful and sad. It was this incredible culmination of love. Hopefully that’s what you’re feeling when you’re watching it.
You definitely feel that watching it. I thought it was significant that Judy leaves Jen her bracelet. She’s worn that throughout most of the show, and there’s a bird on it. Why did you feel like that was an important thing for her to leave for Jen?
At the beginning of season two in episode one, Judy left her bracelet at Jen’s house. They were in a falling-out moment at the time because of the tiny detail that Jen had killed Steve — that old thing when your best friend kills your ex-boyfriend. In that episode, Jen says, “You left your bracelet here. Unless it was just an excuse for you to see me again.” And Judy says, “Did it work?” I thought about that as we were bringing the show to a close. It is this thing that feels so connected to Judy, this very iconic bracelet that she’d been wearing for three seasons. It’s our way of saying, Judy’s not here anymore but she left this symbol and this sort of talisman. It’s a way for Jen to keep Judy close.
Jen gets kind of a happy ending, all things considered. Then at the end of the episode, you do another cliffhanger! I guess it’s not technically a cliffhanger, but Jen’s about to confess to Ben about killing Steve, then the episode ends before we see that confession. Tell me about the decision to end it that way.
I knew that I wanted the show to always feel like Dead to Me. It is a specific tone and we do like to pull the rug out a lot. For me, I didn’t need there to be a happy ending. As a writer, one of the joys of working on this show is that thing where I’m leading you down one set of feelings, and hopefully lulling you into a sense of, Oh, everything kind of worked out. Is this a happy ending? This seems like a happy ending. And I thought, Well, if I really want it to feel like an episode of Dead to Me, it has to end on a cliffhanger. It has to end in an incomplete way that keeps the audience writing the ending for themselves. I really wanted to give the audience this lasting feeling that you’re left with when you lose a friend or a loved one, this feeling that they’re kind of always with you and you carry them with you. So I thought, Okay, well, here’s a good way to really drive that home.
I hate to ask this, but I kind of have to ask this: Have you thought at all about revisiting these characters again since shows never seem to end anymore, they just eventually come back? Or is it too soon to even think about that?
Certainly I would be lying to say that I’ve never thought about it, but I really wanted to deliver a satisfying end to the show and I wanted it to be an end. I really, truly wanted to give the audience closure as much as you can get. So it’s not something I’m planning on, but I’ll just leave that as an ellipsis as well.
