'No Good Deed': Ray Romano and Lisa Kudrow's new comedy

WHAT IT'S ABOUT Lydia Morgan (Lisa Kudrow) and her husband Paul (Ray Romano) need to sell the beautiful old Spanish colonial in Los Feliz they've lived in for years because they need (what else?) the money. She's a concert pianist who can't perform anymore because she's still grieving over the death of her son, while Paul, a carpenter, needs cash to pay off his licentious brother Mikey (Denis Leary), who was just released from prison. Enter the neighbors from hell who want to buy the house: Struggling soap actor JD Campbell (Luke Wilson) and his "trophy" wife No. 3, Margo Starling (Linda Cardellini); and newlyweds Leslie Fisher ("Broad City's Abbi Jacobson) and Sarah Weber (Poppy Liu, "Hacks"). Meanwhile, another couple, Carla Owens (Teyonah Parris, "WandaVision") and Dennis Sampson (O-T Fagbenle, "The Handmaid's Tale") want the house too, and they've got reinforcements — the mother-in-law from hell, Denise (Anna Maria Horsford.)

What none of these grasping buyers know is that a murder once happened in the house of their dreams.

MY SAY The creator of this eight-parter, Liz Feldman, is a mordantly funny writer who (like any mordantly funny writer) writes about all the ridiculous stuff she knows — in her case, the inhabitants of a few highly rarefied ZIP codes in and around Los Angeles. Acutely observant, she knows how people in these ZIP codes talk, dress, eat, drink and also, occasionally, die. Her comedy is dark of necessity, because everyone in her fictional ambit has too much money, too many secrets, too much booze, too much narcissism, and far too much time on their hands. Death is not necessarily a big deal under these sordid circumstances because everyone dies eventually anyway, so why not wring some schadenfreude comedy out of it beforehand?

Feldman's "Dead to Me" — which also starred Cardellini and wrapped in 2022 — revolved around the same general idea. But what makes this comedic style work here to the extent that it does is the cast, and Feldman has assembled a terrific one. Whether Kudrow ("Friends"), Horsford ("Amen"), Romano ("Everybody Loves Raymond"), Cardellini ("Freaks and Geeks") or Leary ("Rescue Me"), viewers have long-standing relationships with each. That comfort level and familiarity tends to blunt the edge of Feldman's lacerating style. How bad could a murder really be if Raymond and Phoebe are involved?

Islip native Matt Rogers — the comedian and co-host of podcast "Las Culturistas" with "SNL's" Bowen Yang — also stars as the Morgan's highly motivated real estate agent, Greg. He effortlessly steals all his scenes too, which blunts that edge just a little more. (Linda Lavin, starring as the nosy neighbor, does the same).

That's the good, which should easily carry you more than halfway through this run. Now the less-good: This series starts to stretch after that midway point, then sag, and finally flop out of sheer exhaustion. What's dark gets darker. What's (initially) plausible turns ridiculous. Questions start to mount during the slow parts, which start to pile up too. Why, for example, did a concert pianist marry a carpenter — the former who appears to know nothing about music, the latter even less about carpentry? None of the characters has a dimension beyond the bare-minimum requisite two, or three (shallow, conceited, self-centered). Or is that the whole idea?

So do come for some funny Feldman lines (a few of which draw blood) and lively performances — everyone does, in fact, look like they're having a good time. Just don't expect a whole lot more.

BOTTOM LINE Great cast, funny lines, but "Deed" loses momentum after a strong start