‘Dead To Me’ Creator Liz Feldman On Its Final Season 3: The Ending “Came To Me Pretty Profoundly”
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Dead To Me creator Liz Feldman recently announced that the show’s upcoming third season will be its last. Celebrating four Emmy nominations following Tuesday’s announcement, Feldman told Deadline the idea for how the show would end came to her in a flash during production on Season 2.
“I always knew from the inception of the show that I didn’t want it to be a long long-running show,” she said. “Then there was a certain point when we were in production on Season 2 when the end of the show came to me, pretty profoundly, so I realized, ‘I know the story that I have to tell’ and Season 3 feels like the right time to do that. It’s just something that came to me organically, and I tend to try to follow the gut feelings I have.”
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Feldman also said she was impressed by the self-editing skills of creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who determinedly stopped at two seasons for her wildly successful Emmy-winning comedy Fleabag. “This show means so much to me and I just want to get it right, and I saw a way to do that. I think three seasons for this show is the right amount.”
Feldman added that Season 3 is already in the writers’ room, although of course no one is sure when production might be able to start, given the COVID-19 stoppages. “We’ll be writing for many months, which will buy us some time in terms of starting production,” she said, “we’re definitely hoping to start at some point in the next six months. Obviously anything can happen… we were always going to have a longer writing process for this final season, especially given that we’re doing it on Zoom, we’re allowing ourselves a little bit more time because it’s just harder to spend ten hours a day staring at writers in little boxes. It definitely is not as fun and free-flowing as a traditional writers’ room.”
As for the show’s Emmy-nominated leads Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini, who play Jen and Judy, two friends united by a murder plot, Feldman says she’s apprised them of the basics of the show’s ending. “They’ve known for a while that I’ve been thinking about Season 3 as our last season, and they have some idea of what’s going to happen, but they know that it’s could also morph and evolve. They don’t know everything.”
Feldman credited the authenticity of the show’s central friendship story to working with writer Kelly Hutchinson. “We were room mates in college,” she said, “and have known each other since we were 17 years old. I think some of the reason the characters of Jen and Judy do feel like such real friends is obviously that is that Christina and Linda are incredibly talented actresses who genuinely have chemistry and love for each other, but the inception and writing of the characters comes from such a real place of friendship.
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