The Tragic Real-Life Inspiration Behind The End Of Christina Applegate's Dead To Me
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2022 was a huge year for Christina Applegate. Not only did she earn a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but she wrapped up her acclaimed Netflix series, Dead to Me. This was a huge accomplishment given that the series was almost indefinitely postponed after her Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis. Thanks to Applegate's strength, fans of the series got to see the fate of her character, Jen, as well as Linda Cardellini's Judy.
Spoilers Ahead For The End Of Netflix's Dead To MeIn an interview with Vulture, series creator Liz Feldman revealed that her plans for the ending of the series were altered by more than just Applegate's health issues. They were changed by better understanding the very real inspiration behind the series and the collective grief the world was experiencing.
Is Dead To Me Based On A True Story?
According to an interview with Glamour, much of Liz Feldman's Dead to Me is based on a rather horrible time in her life. Prior to turning 40, Feldman was struggling with fertility problems and was dealing with the tragic passing of her cousin. All of the pain and frustration inspired her to write the series.
"My fertility journey has felt more like an odyssey, or if I’m being really honest, a full-on Greek tragedy," Feldman explained to Glamour of one of her chief inspirations for the series.
"There have been painful procedures, infections, and miscarriage. Just when I thought things might be looking up, a lab technician at my fertility clinic lost the one egg they were able to retrieve from me. Yes, you read that right. I made one egg and they lost it. And yes, you’re totally allowed to laugh. It was my eighth egg retrieval. I had to laugh too, because I was so tired of crying.I have learned to look at the darkest moments in life and see the comic aura around them. It’s become more than a coping mechanism; it’s my ethos. And now it’s a TV show."
On top of these two rather personal sources of inspiration, Liz Feldman has admitted that the character of Judy (played by Linda Cardellini) was heavily inspired by a friend.
"The truth is that Judy was inspired by a dear friend of mine who we lost at 38," Feldman said during an interview with Vulture.
"She had a pain in her body that she wasn’t paying attention to, or that maybe she was paying attention to but not necessarily following through about," Feldman continued. "She was this ethereal, beautiful, magnanimous, angelic person who was literally the kind of person that would stop and help an old lady across the street, almost against the old lady’s will. She was just one of those people who, though she was not here for nearly long enough, just left this indelible mark. It was almost subliminal in my work of writing the show that I carried her with me. And then when I thought about how to really properly end it, she came up for me."
Did Liz Feldman Know The End Of Dead To Me From The Start?
According to her interview With Vulture, Liz Feldman had some idea about how the series would end. This certainly wasn't true when she first pitched the idea to Netflix, but over the course of making her show, Feldman found a direction she wanted to head in. However, when the pandemic started, she decided to take a slightly different course of action. This was out of being "sensitive" to the audience who were all going through a tremendously difficult period.
"I just ended up telling it in a different way. It came to me in the middle of shooting season two that Jen and Judy needed to have some sort of closure that healed both of their deepest wounds. So I knew that, and I felt like, Okay, I’ve been telling this story for two seasons at that point of grief and loss and forgiveness and friendship, and I don’t want to forget that is the heart and the soul and the DNA of the show. I’m like, how do you bring closure to a show about female friendship as it pertains to going through grief and loss?"
Feldman found a lot of help from her writers' room, who inspired her to make some of the most entrancing creative decisions throughout the course of the series.
"The truth is season one didn’t even end the way that I originally intended it to. One of my brilliant writers came up with the idea that Jen should kill Steve, and then that would be the ultimate Strangers on a Train kind of cosmic balance of comeuppance. He was right, and I’m so glad we did that," Feldman said to Vulture. "Because we did that, it changed everything I thought season two was going to be. And then we ended season two the way we did, and we were sort of hurtling toward that ending."
Those who have seen the end of the Dead to Me are aware that it's somewhat ambiguous. While this may be seen as lazy by some, others see the brilliance of not being clear about Judy's fate.
"I wanted to leave it up to the audience to decide on some level what happened, because you don’t really ever see what happened. That is all very deliberate," Feldman admitted.
"I wanted to give you a reflection of what it feels like to go through the loss of someone, where it feels like they just took off," Feldman continued. "You’ve just been hanging out with them and they got in their car and they left, or they walked into the other room, or perhaps they jumped on a boat and floated away. For so many people that is really what it feels like because you’re not really there with the person when they go. So that’s what I was going for, but also, this is Dead to Me. So did she die?"
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