For Fans of Dead to Me

Dead to Me doesn't treat grief as a setup for jokes. It treats grief as the thing that makes people do irrational, destructive, occasionally criminal things, and then it finds the comedy in the wreckage. That is a much harder trick to pull off than a standard dark comedy. The show earns every absurd plot turn because the emotional logic underneath it is airtight.

Big Little Lies proved it, Dead to Me confirmed it: audiences want stories about women who protect each other in ways the law would not sanction. The genre's signature move is giving its characters moral complexity that would read as villainy in a lesser show and making you root for them anyway. A Simple Favor and Promising Young Woman do the same thing in film form.

Dead to Me is set in a Laguna Beach beachside suburb that looks like a catalog for aspirational living, and the show knows exactly what that backdrop is for. The gap between how a place looks and what happens inside it is the joke and the menace at the same time. Desperate Housewives built a whole universe on this gap. Knives Out turns the setting into a character.

Her Story and Telling Lies put you in the position of piecing together the truth from fragments, the same cognitive state Dead to Me keeps its audience in across three seasons. You never have the full picture, and the show weaponizes that discomfort. Disco Elysium goes further by making the player character himself an unreliable narrator haunted by things he can't fully remember.