Good Girls

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.