Review: Dead to Me (Season 1)

By Spencer Coile 

In recent years, Netflix has held the honor and burden of bringing to life countless TV series – giving a voice to talent previously under or unseen. While it has become impossible to keep up with everything the platform currently has to offer, it also allows its creators, writers, and directors to tell their stories on their terms. Gone are the days where television was situated comfortably in the binary of comedy and drama. Now we have space carved out for shows that subvert our expectations, make us uncomfortable, and if we’re lucky, invite us into the artist’s vision. 

Liz Feldman takes complete advantage of this genre fluidity. Her Netflix creation, Dead to Me (streaming now), is a darkly comic meditation on grief and the ways it manifests within our interpersonal relationships. Featuring especially remarkable turns from two typically underutilized actresses, Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini, Dead to Me is a prickly, but surprisingly personal examination into how we process trauma... 

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Tribeca 2019: "The Place of No Words"

Here's Jason Adams reporting from Tribeca once more...

Do you remember the moment you first realized what death is? The goldfish speech from Kill Bill: Volume II comes to mind -- "A fish flapping on the carpet, and a fish not flapping on the carpet." I remember a dead squirrel in the middle of the road, personally. But I think for most of us, the lucky ones who didn't experience an early loss, it's too gradual a process to recollect. The idea of a before and an after, heck even the concept of time itself, was less defined. Of course then we get older. Now I'm watching my friends have to explain these ideas to their kids, putting walls and definitions around boundless ideas.

Mark Webber's The Place of Lost Words attempts to straddle both of those places...

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Tribeca 2019: "Lucky Grandma"

And here is Jason Adams reporting from Tribeca again...

It's easy to recognize Grandma -- she's the one called Grandma. But if you're sitting about ten feet away from Chinatown NYC as I am as I type this review, it's even easier -- I could step out onto the street and see a dozen women who look just like Grandma. If I happened to walk just a little further away to the local movie theater, I wouldn't see a single Grandma, not one. And that is what makes Sasie Sealy's film Lucky Grandma feel so easily revolutionary. Grandmas are everywhere, but this is the one...

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Tribeca 2019: "Buffaloed"

Reporting from Tribeca once more here is Jason Adams...

I am not from Buffalo. I am from Rochester, which is one hour or so east of Buffalo. But I'm from close enough to Buffalo to know that Buffaloed -- a new comedy starring Zoey Deutch and Judy Greer -- knows Buffalo. So much so I had to spend some time googling the people that made it. Director Tanya Wexlermight be from Chicago (the Buffalo of the mid-west) but, sure enough, writer Brian Sacca is a ranch-soaked Buffalonian good ol' boy. And so Buffaloed knows its Anchor Bar versus Duffs chicken wing rivalries, and it knows "Go Bills" is how one expresses a goodbye. Its arteries are clogged with verifiable Upstate-isms. 

This might all seem trivial at the outset, but Buffaloed gets its sense of place, and what's so funny about its sense of place, so right that it builds its own little magical world out of it...

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Tribeca 2019: "Swallow"

Here's Jason Adams reporting from Tribeca once again...

I will only ever experience childbirth from the one side, and you know what? I'm good with that. All due credit to the mothers out there who manage to keep the world populated -- including my own, who was in labor with me for ten hours [shudder] -- but I'm thrown into a tizzy if I stub my toe. Some of the horror stories I've heard from female friends about the experience have turned my all of my reproductive organs into ash. 

I over-share all of this because this has always made me a prime sucker for pregnancy horror films. Rosemary's Baby, as I've covered here before, is my favorite film of all time. And we just got a doozy of a new take on this sub-genre with Swallow, writer-director Carlo Mirabella-Davis' fantastic new film starring a riveting Haley Bennett as an expectant mother whose isolation and surprise hesitancy spirals her down an unexpected path...

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