‘Dead to Me’ Should Be Dead to No One

I AM CONVINCED that 20 years from now, Dead to Me will finally get the praise it’s due, ending up in some culture magazine’s ranking of the best TV comedies of all time. (I’m giving you a head start, Sojourners: Beat Rolling Stone to the punch.)

Dead to Me, a Netflix show about a woman and her children grieving her husband after he is killed in a hit-and-run, is sort of what you would get if you merged another destined TV classic from Netflix — Grace and Frankie — with the Joan Didion memoir The Year of Magical Thinking and then sprinkled in a police investigation. The show is laugh-so-hard-you-cry funny and yet is driven by situations that would probably make you weep if you paused to think.

I barely had time to do that, though, because Dead to Me is a twisty thriller centered around a hilarious opposites-attract friendship between the widowed protagonist Jen (Christina Applegate) and a jolly woman she meets at group grief therapy named Judy (Linda Cardellini). Throw in some great meditations on friendship, forgiveness, motherhood, absence, and why everything is so screwed up if the whole world is in God’s hands; a Christian youth dance troupe; and an astounding performance by the actor James Marsden, and you have one of the best TV shows ever.

A backstory: After completing the second season, Applegate was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and decided to film a third and final season anyway, enduring her pain to provide a beautiful conclusion to the show. While her condition is not terminal, her remarkable performance has an emotional kick akin to that of Chadwick Boseman’s Oscar-nominated turn in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom during his eventually fatal battle with colon cancer.

It is great art like Dead to Me that makes me wonder whether awards actually matter. In a more perfect world, Dead to Me would at least have received a Golden Globe for best comedy series, if not also the Emmy equivalent. (Of course, in an even more perfect world, all incredible art would get its due and not be pitted against other works for prestige. God keeps having to remind me that there are more important things in this world than getting white people to recognize Beyoncé’s excellence.)

I keep “trying to make fetch happen,” though, and will probably also keep doing the same for Dead to Me. I’m just following in the ways of the youths, who are big these days on giving people their flowers while they’re still here. Let’s cherish Dead to Me now in case Netflix pulls an HBO Max and removes it from their platform to get a tax break.