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Claire Crick

No Good Deed episode 1 recap: what dark secret is hiding in the house?

No Good Deed.

No Good Deed is a dark comedy starring Lisa Kudrow and Ray Romano as empty-nesters Lydia and Paul Morgan, a couple who are selling their picturesque LA family home.

No Good Deed recaps

However the house sale soon opens up painful family secrets - but can they hide them from the prying eyes of the cutthroat buyers battling it out to get their hands on their 1920s Spanish-style villa?

Here is everything that happened in No Good Deed episode 1...

The series opens with prospective buyers looking around Lydia and Paul's house, everyone is very impressed with how beautiful it is as the realtor, Greg does his best-selling pitch. However, the buyers have absolutely no idea that Lydia and Greg are watching them from a locked bedroom upstairs on a secret camera.

While Paul seems keen to sell their family home after admitting that they need the money after taking out a second mortgage, Lydia gets upset at the thought of someone else living in their home and enjoying their garden, admitting that it is full of happy memories from when their kids were small.

We find out that while Lydia and Paul have raised their family in the house, Paul actually grew up in it himself after moving in at the age of 8. He makes a comment about there being memories but not all of them good, which hints that something has happened in the house in the past that they have kept a secret.

As Lydia passes comments on each of the prospective buyers, a glamorous woman called Margo arrives at the house and Lydia says she would rather burn her home to the ground than sell it to her.

The other potential buyers are out-of-work soap opera star JD, parents-to-be Dennis and Carla who can't afford the house but are desperate to raise their family there, and Lesley and her wife Sarah, who live around the corner and have walked past the house every day, dreaming of living there.

Paul and Lydia watch the prospective buyers on a live stream. (Image credit: Netflix )

Lydia decides they should go and speak to the prospective buyers to get a sense of who they are and decide who they like the best, however, Paul sees someone on the camera that he knows and tells her not to leave the room they are hiding in.

Later, as Lydia replaces their family photos on the mantlepiece she daydreams about the days her house was full of noise and laughter with the children and calls her son Jacob to chat but gets his voicemail.

But while she is indoors reminiscing, Paul is in the garage cutting wood on an electric saw when the man he spotted on the video of the house viewings arrives. It turns out he is called Mikey and has just got out of jail after serving 3 years for drugs. But while the pair seem to know each other well, they clearly share a dark past and things are frosty between them. Mikey says he needs money and demands $80.000 from Paul by tomorrow, which Paul tells him he doesn't have. However, Mikey isn't taking no for an answer and says if he doesn't pay up then he's going to tell the police what happened in the house. Then, to make sure Paul has got the message, he starts up the electric saw and shoves Paul's hand into it, spraying blood everywhere.

As Paul rushes into the house to try and do something about the bleeding, looking like he is about to pass out with the pain, Dennis, the dad-to-be who wants to buy the house, pulls up outside with his mother and they talk about how he is going to afford it... his mom clearly worried that he is biting off more than he can chew.

Meanwhile, across the road, soap opera star JD is complaining to his agent, Lenny, on the phone that he needs to downsize his house becasue the one he is living in is too expensive. He is frustrated with his modern house becasue he can't work any of the fancy kitchen appliances and it is revealed he only bought it becasue his wife liked it.

Paul isn't pleased to see Mikey is out of jail. (Image credit: Netflix )

At Lydia and Paul's house, Lydia is getting her antique piano tuned and the tuner is in awe of her, revealing she is a very talented musician but hasn't played the piano in ages. Once it is tuned, he tells her to have a try, and in her head she is playing a beautiful piece of music, but it is just a daydream and she hides her shaking hands in her lap.

Margo is in bed with her lover, Gwen, who is a high-end developer, and she is trying to persuade her to invest in the house, convinced they could make a killing if they ripped out Lydia's beloved garden and put in a pool.

At home that evening, Lydia is cooking Paul dinner when she notices his bandaged hand and he tells her that Mikey is out of jail. She seems worried and Paul tells her Mikey knows everything and could destroy them. Paul tells Lydia to start packing and that he will figure something out about the money.

Meanwhile, Dennis tells Carla that his mom is sitting on loads of cash and he has worked out that if she invests some money into the Los Feliz house, then they can afford it and she could be their live-in nanny when the baby is born. Unsurprisingly, Carla doesn't seem too impressed.

At the same time, Margot is getting ready for bed and braces herself to climb into bed with her husband, who turns out to be JD. She pretends she has been with friends, not her lover, and when Harper wants to say goodnight, she pretends to care and gets out of bed again.

At the villa, Lesley has come to do a night-time look at the place as she promised Sarah, but she is desperate to know what is going on in the locked room of the house that she saw at the house viewing and gets in the side gate to take a closer look. She panics when the floodlights and the sprinkler system come on and tries to escape, meanwhile, Paul and Lydia have woken up and think Mikey is in their garden. Paul tells Lydia to stay in the house and she goes to Jacob's room to leave him another message while Paul gets a secret gun hidden in a basement pipe...

Lydia wants to make sure they sell to the right people. (Image credit: Netflix )

JD and Margot talk about the fact the house has come up for sale, neither mentioning they have been to see it. JD hints they should buy it, while Margot says it is unsurprising they are selling now as you have to wait three years before you have to disclose your son died in the house.

The episode then cuts to Lydia in Jacob's room and she is still leaving him a voicemail telling him she misses him and wishes he could be there with him while looking at his photo. When she hangs up, the bedroom lights flicker, and she takes this as a sign that he is there.

Downstairs Paul tells Lydia the coast is clear outside but when she goes back up to bed he hides his gun in the piano and a brief flashback sees the same gun lying on a tiled floor and the body of a male lying in a pool of blood.

In the present day, Paul doesn't realize Lesley is still hiding in the garden and has seen him with the gun before racing back to her car and driving off.

All episodes of No Good Deed are now available to stream worldwide on Netflix.

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