Jen and Judy are back — but this time, there’s a catch.
Netflix has announced it has renewed Dead to Me for a third and final season.
According to star and executive producer Christina Applegate, the decision was a creative one and “the best way to tie up the story”.
In a tweet, Applegate wrote: “I will miss these ladies. But we felt this was the best way to tie up the story of these women. Thank you to all the fans. We will be getting back to work when it is safe to do so.”
Dead to Me centred around two women, Jen (Applegate) and Judy (Linda Cardellini) who meet at a grief support meeting after Jen’s husband is killed by a hit-and-run driver.
The first and second seasons saw their friendship evolve as the women were drawn together by an unsolved murder and the wrath of Judy’s ex-husband, the abusive Steve (James Marsden).
Series creator, Liz Feldman, said that “from start to finish, Dead To Me is exactly the show I wanted to make” and that it has been “an incredible gift”.
“Telling a story sprung from grief and loss has stretched me as an artist and healed me as a human. I’ll be forever indebted to my partners in crime, my friends for life, Christina and Linda, and our brilliantly talented writers, cast and crew. I am beyond grateful to Netflix for supporting Dead To Me from day one,” she said in a statement.
In an interview with Variety after the second season was released earlier this year, Feldman said that it had given the writers a chance to put their energy into storylines about what can happen to a person “by separating them from their mother”.
As the writer’s room was preparing the season, children were being separated from their families in the US.
What manifested was Jen losing her mother at a young age, and Judy helping to put her addict mum away in prison.
“We started looking at Jen and Judy and asking ourselves, ‘Why are they the way they are? How did they turn out like this?’ And when we started to analyze ourselves and get to the roots of our own personality flaws, so much of our identities and the way in which we are shaped into people are an extension of the way we were raised by our mothers,” Feldman told the outlet.
According to the creator, there were no psychologists involved, however, joked that many of her writers “had been in therapy for years”.
Dead to Me has received critical acclaim, with Applegate being nominated for both an Emmy and Golden Globe for the first season.
The third and final season is set to debut in 2021.