Quickly becoming the most popular show on Netflix this week, Dead To Me creator Liz Feldman brought her signature TV show style, pairing comedy with deep emotional elements and mystery, to her new series No Good Deed. Starring Lisa Kudrow, Ray Romano, Linda Cardellini, Denis Leary, Abbi Jacobson, Teyonah Parris, Luke Wilson, O-T Fagbenle and Poppy Liu, there’s a lot to attract a strong audience to this series.

In No Good Deed we meet couple Lydia (Kudrow) and Paul Morgan (Romano). Lydia is a former professional pianist who can’t bring herself to play the instrument anymore, after the death of her son and becoming estranged from her daughter. Paul is a contractor who worked hard to renovate their Spanigh-style California home that the couple are now selling with their realtor Greg (Matt Rogers), getting a lot of interest from different families.

The interested couples include pregnant Carla (Parris) and Dennis (Fagbenle), who are looking to move into a bigger house before their baby is born, while also dealing with Dennis’ overbearing mother who wants to move in with them.

“I feel that Carla’s self-restraint and ability to navigate this situation is tremendous, she does such a great job,” Parris told Yahoo Canada. “She does a better job than I think that I would be able to do.”

“There’s a kind of infantilization that both comes from the mom, and he’s up for being taken care of,” Fagbenle added. “He doesn’t have a strong sense of self. He kind of, I think, fundamentally lacks some confidence and self-knowledge.”

“It’s always fun to play people who are unaware of themselves, because I guess to some extent we all are unaware of some parts of ourselves. And so, there was a journey of him discovering himself and discovering his new boo and all the escapades that come out of that.”

There’s also couple Leslie (Jacobson) and Sarah (Liu) who are on the hunt for their dream home. These characters were inspired by Feldman and her wife.

“Truthfully, I kind of always write from my own experience and … Leslie Fisher is definitely loosely inspired by by me,” Feldman shared. “I wanted to portray a queer couple, just like my wife and I, who want the same things that every couple wants. They want safety and security, and the home of their dreams, and a family. And it was really important to me to just weave that into the fabric of the show, just like queer people are weaved into the fabric of society.”

“But I also have aspects of my personality that I kind of infuse into every character, because I need to understand a character in order to write them and I need to feel for them. … I need to come from a place of empathy, so I generally give every character at least something from my life that I can sort of relate to. It gives me sort of an entry point into every character.”

Lydia and Paul live next to Margo (Cardellini), a larger-than-life personality who also works in real estate. She’s married to JD, who became famous for starring in a soap opera called “Rising Tides,” but has been having some trouble landing new roles.

“I loved playing Judy [in Dead To Me], … I had so much fun being her, and then to go and do something so different and to have Liz, whose sense of humour I completely trust, and this vision that she always has that is so specific,” Cardellini said. “We have such great writers too, but just the things that they wrote for me to do and the way that she looks, it just was so much fun to play.”

All the characters in No Good Deed are hiding secrets, some more extreme than others, with the story going through a number of twists and turns as more details about these characters are revealed.

‘It’s a tricky line to walk and that was one of my concerns’

With the show leaning into Feldman’s signature mix of tones, it’s a delicate balance between comedy and emotional resonance that had to be found.

“It’s a tricky line to walk and that was one of my concerns, was the tone,” Romano said. “We want the comedy, … but we want the stakes to be high and be invested.”

“I think [Lisa and I] were both wondering, boy I hope we don’t lose the danger of this for the sake of comedy, and we didn’t, [Liz Feldman] pulled it off.”

A great example of how Feldman’s work navigates sweeping changes in tone is how the show can go from a hysterical moment when Romano’s character is buying cocaine from a pet groomer, to an emotional moment when Lydia plays the piano with JD.

“The awkwardness and the fear was very organic,” Romano said. “I have done scenes with cocaine before and I’m just as nervous. Even though it’s fake, I’m nervous putting that stuff up in there.”

“Matt Rogers, I had never met him or worked with him, and that was a cool thing that we developed … this rapport. … We were actually pretty funny together.”

Kudrow went on to say that she loved her sweet moment with Wilson.

“I think Luke is so great. He made me laugh so much at the table reads and watching him was so fun,” Kudrow said. “He was so good and I was thrilled that I got to do something with him.”

“I loved that scene and I think as we did it, it got a little sweeter than even what was on paper. So that was great.”

“I spent like two months getting emails like, ‘We need you to listen to this piano track. This is what you’re going to be singing along to.’ And I just said, look let me sing and then you guys do the piano track based on that, because I can’t sing. I can’t hold the tune … in key,” Wilson said in a separate interview. “That was one of those scenes where I just had to be like, ‘Hey, just have fun with it. Enjoy it. You’re not supposed to sound good.'”

“That’s where you see that someone like Lisa, obviously very funny and great at comedy, but also so good dramatically, there’s just a warmth that comes from her that made it very easy for me. … One minute I’m singing Elton John and the next minute I’m in tears. So when I read that on paper I think, OK well how am I going to do that? And as the day gets closer, sometimes you can get a little more nervous about something, but just knowing how good Lisa is and something about the way she acted helped me to do that each time.”

‘I created a genre that I wanted to watch’

Jacobson also highlighted Feldman’s unique ability to create really “nuanced” characters, but still leaning into the appealing twists and turns in the mystery story.

“You’re on the edge of your seat in this mystery and you want to know more. And I’ve never really gotten to do anything like that,” Jacobson said.

Feldman highlighted that much of the mystery and twists in the show are possible due to her team of writers.

“The first step I take in writing the great mystery is hiring incredible writers,” she said. “I do it with a team of incredible women, … there are two men on our staff for this season, and you rely on everyone to come up with twists that I don’t even see coming.”

“If I feel surprised when somebody says something in the room I think, OK this will hopefully subvert expectations, and that’s what a good mystery is about. It’s taking you in one direction and making you think that you might kind of know what’s going on, and then pulling the rug out and revealing a whole other bottom that you didn’t see coming. … I watch a lot of drama and mystery that are just sort of straight, not comedic, and I just was like, why can’t there be a show like this, but it’s also funny? Because, inherently, I just look at life through a comic lens, as the way I cope, and so I think in a way I created a genre that I wanted to watch.”