Good Girls

Good Girls doesn’t always find the balance, but thanks to remarkable performances from its leads and a daring streak of risky storytelling, it’s a welcome addition to the procedural-heavy world of network drama.

Like its main characters, Good Girls, goes to unexpected places. Here’s hoping NBC viewers know a good, original show when they see it.

[Good Girls] is a pulpy, soapy delight that finds a new story to tell about good girls gone bad.

It feels like there’s a built-in shelf life for Good Girls, but watching these frazzled moms use their hard-won problem-solving skills to get out of scrapes is a fun caper while it lasts.

The show relies heavily on the strength of those three principals, and it has chosen wisely in Hendricks, Whitman, and Retta. ... Because Good Girls also operates like a character-driven family drama, the more tension-building aspects of the plot sometimes feels like they’re coming at you too fast.

Hendricks, Retta and Whitman give believably strong and collaborative performances as three people stuck in a dangerous mess. The supporting cast (especially Lillard) also provides a sound base from which the show can broaden its perspectives and subplots. While the show nimbly mixes action with you-go-girl snark, it occasionally stumbles in its fleeting and nominal nods to a feminist subtext, which should be self-evident and not needing an extra coat of empowerment to make it shine.

Good Girls feels like a cable show squished into a network-shaped box, but it's still generally more than watchable thanks to a trio of leading ladies--Christina Hendricks, Retta and Mae Whitman--who appear to be having a tremendous time playing funny, badass characters who are the focus of the show and not just wives or girlfriends.

For now, the three lead performances are uniformly winning while the pacing is bracingly brisk. The male characters in large part are furniture to be moved around in service to the women’s varying predicaments and aspirations.

The resulting frying-pan-and-fire story line forces the three leads to confront how serious they are about being criminals. The problem, as enjoyable as Good Girls often is, is that it seems unsure how serious it is about being a crime story.

The seemingly unsustainable plot cries out to be a one-shot movie rather than an ongoing series. It’s too bad, too, because the show’s themes resonate in this #MeToo moment, but a “no good can come from this” plot gets in the way.

Girls is good company, but I was kind of hoping for great. [19 Feb - 4 Mar 2018, p.15]

Good Girls understands the genre (revenge fantasy) and source material (see above) but hasn’t the slightest idea what to do with it.

As is, it’s more of a dark comedy that can’t be dark enough to earn the drama or sharp enough to work as a comedy. It tries to be everything, but moves too quickly between genres to fit into a 44-minute cut.

The writing has promising moments but is more safe than daring, which renders the characters a bit too tame, especially in a narrative where the women's morality is challenged by their increasing levels of desperation.

Tone is everything for a show like Good Girls--it needs a strong, sure narrative pulse. It needs its own variation on the comic-thriller, its own new take on successful serious/humorous TV shows like Nurse Jackie or Weeds or (they wish) Breaking Bad. Note that all those shows were on cable and you’ve got the reason Good Girls ultimately fails: As a network show, it can’t go far enough, deep enough, into these women’s lives to make us root for them with anything like intensity. Good Girls needs to break bad much more badly than it’s allowed to as part of NBC’s lineup.

The show’s success owes primarily to the performances by the lead actors, who are so appealing that you might not remember they are actually committing crimes including theft, kidnapping, blackmail and transporting contraband across international borders. And that’s just in the first three episodes.

A lot of individual pieces succeed, in part due to the versatility and appeal of the three leads--Whitman’s spent her whole career zipping back and forth between laughs (Arrested Development) and tears (Parenthood), and Hendricks (Mad Men) and Retta (Parks and Recreation) have both on their resumés, too--but too many scenes are at odds with one another.

These characters are so charismatic, it makes the horrifying situations they’re stuck in even more depressing, so much so that you long to see them on any other type of show.

It’s a wan attempt to make points--good points--about sexism, inequality, patriarchy, and health care, stitched together with a story line that is seriously underdeveloped. The show, from Jenna Bans, is remarkably shallow, from the plot details to, more importantly, the central characters.