REVIEW: Netflix’s No Good Deed is an absolute punish and a waste of stars Ray Romano and Lisa Kudrow

TV shows, movies and books are make-believe.

That’s why we love things like Star Wars, Game of Thrones and Chronicles of Narnia. Animals can talk, dragons are real and gravity doesn’t follow the rules of physics.

But even with all that, there is still a fundamental tenet a story has to follow, no matter how outlandish its world. It has to obey the rules of its own internal logic, otherwise it bumps and takes you out of the story.

Think of the times when you’re in the middle of watching something and a ridiculous twist or beat happens. You audibly groan and go, “Urgh, really?”. That’s the filmmaker breaking its contract with the audience.

We’re willing to suspend disbelief and put up with a lot, but only up to the point it still makes sense that an established character would make that choice, or that A leads to B leads to C.

Now, multiply that groan or eyeroll by 27 times and you have No Good Deed, an eight-episode TV series that has no magical realism or sci-fi/fantasy elements but exists in an entirely implausible world.

The genre is dark comedy but you’ll rarely if ever laugh – and that’s the least of its problems.

The series is centred on Paul (Ray Romano) and Lydia Morgan (Lisa Kudrow). They’re trying to sell their beautiful house in the desirable Los Angeles neighbourhood of Los Feliz.

There are four key would-be buyers competing for it – couples Sarah (Poppy Liu) and Leslie (Abbi Jacobson), and Dennis (O-T Fagbenle) and Carla (Teyonah Parris), plus maybe property flipper Margo (Linda Cardellini), and JD (Luke Wilson), a former soap star who is the Morgans’ neighbour.

The Morgans are holding onto a secret about a death in the house three years earlier, and it’s the reason Paul wants to sell and Lydia doesn’t. She’s stuck in the moment everything went tits-up and it’s caused a strain in their marriage.

In this pressure cooker is also Mikey (Denis Leary), who is trying to extort Paul for $80,000. Mikey is connected to the secret of what happened in the house – PS: It’s not that good of a secret.

Of the would-be buyers, there are also lies, half-truths and omissions, both from each other and from the audience, almost all of which are inconsequential to the overall plot.

The only thing that seems to propel No Good Deed is to be so knotty that the world’s most determined masseuse wouldn’t have a chance in hell of working through them.

To call it unnecessarily twisty is an understatement. No Good Deed is not a TV show so much as a collection of dumb story and character choices that make the most fanciful of daytime soaps seem grounded and realistic.

It’s a waste of a starry cast, all of whom are treading water playing characters you could never invest in. Even the most interesting pair – Fagbenle and Parris’ Dennis and Carla – are just approximations of better-written characters from somewhere else.

No Good Deed hails from Liz Feldman, the creator of Dead to Me, another series that is almost as ludicrous as this one, relying on little more than shocks and twists to disguise the fact that it’s just not very interesting.

There’s certainly an appetite for lighter stories in this vein – Only Murders in the Building is one of them – and when they’re plotted well and with discipline, it’s a real treat.

But this? Well, you know the saying the title is derived from. If you reward No Good Deed with your time, all you’ll get is punishment.

No Good Deed is on Netflix