Nell Serrano (Gina Rodriguez), a journalist who abandoned her career five years ago to follow a man to London, imagines the headline that would announce her story: “Local Woman, 37, Ruins Own Life.” Now she’s back at the SoCal Independent, newly single and freshly miserable. Her old work friends, Sam (Hannah Simone) and Dennis (Josh Banday), are now her editors, and snooty heiress Lexi (Lauren Ash) has taken over the paper from her father. Not only that, but Nell is saddled with a beat that she doesn’t want: writing obituaries.
Developed by This Is Us executive producers Casey Johnson and David Windsor, Not Dead Yet is a loose adaptation of Alexandra Potter’s 2020 novel confessions of a forty-something f**k-up, with an added twist: the ghost of each of her subjects haunts Nell until she submits their obituary. But neither an infusion of the supernatural nor the presence of Rodriguez, who radiated warmth and intelligence as the title character on the CW’s Jane the Virgin, can enliven a series that meanders through the first five episodes made available to press.
Nell is meant to be smart but listless, like a vaguer, gentler version of Kristen Bell’s wayward Eleanor Shellstrop on The Good Place, but she often comes off more as clueless. Does she really think that her best friend’s breast pump is an airhorn? (She’s been in England, not on Mars.) When the jokes aren’t particularly clever—“Writing about you is like trying to put a positive spin on the Hindenburg,” Nell tells one undead companion (Brittany Snow)—it’s hard to buy that Nell is clever, despite the show’s insistence that she was once a budding journalism star.
The show’s repetitive structure (new obit, new ghost) overwhelms any forward momentum of the living characters’ relationships, and the thinness of some of the supporting characters doesn’t help. Doing her best Jane Krakowski impression, Ash isn’t able to do much to make the obnoxious, absurdly out-of-touch Lexi believable as a human being. And while the presence of Nell’s gamer roommate, Edward (Rick Glassman), offers some explicit lessons in sensitivity toward the neurodivergent, it does so without fully integrating the character or his experience into the plot of Not Dead Yet. “I’m not letting him walk all over me,” Nell says heavy-handedly at one point. “He’s on the spectrum and honesty is part of his personality!”
Not Dead Yet gestures toward the kind of quirkily heartfelt moments that resolve many episodes of shows like Modern Family and Jane the Virgin—one plotline, for example, involves Nell befriending an obituary subject’s lonely widow, Cricket (Angela Elayne Gibbs)—but these mostly fall flat. And instead of investing time in developing the sense of community or culture that a workplace comedy demands, the series wastes too much of its half-hour running time on kooky office sideplots, like Dennis’s fear of throwing basketballs.
Not Dead Yet is at its funniest when it zooms out, as in a series of shots showing how Nell’s conversations with the invisible dead people look to passersby, or in the flashes of darker humor about mortality: Snow’s character, a social media influencer, fell off a cliff while posing for a selfie but managed to post one final pic on the way down. And the fifth episode features a much-needed glimpse into Nell’s past that will hopefully offer Rodriguez more opportunity to demonstrate the emotional range that made Jane the Virgin so addictive.
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