Good Girls

Good Girls begins with a very simple but highly effective idea: three ordinary women, exhausted from trying to make ends meet and solve everyone else’s problems, decide to rob a supermarket. What was supposed to be a one-time job to get them out of trouble ends up dragging them into a criminal world that becomes increasingly difficult to escape.

The series has a fantastic beginning. It is funny, fast-paced and finds a fairly original variation on the familiar story of ordinary people crossing a line and discovering that they cannot go back. Instead of the usual male antihero, we have three suburban mothers balancing schools, mortgages, disastrous marriages and sick children with robbery, money laundering and dangerous criminals.

Beth, Ruby and Annie do not suddenly become brilliant criminals. They improvise, make mistakes, panic and take absurd decisions. That is where much of the early humor comes from: these are women completely out of their depth, trying to survive situations that become larger and more dangerous every time. Every solution creates a new problem, and every attempt to leave crime behind only pulls them deeper into it.

Christina Hendricks is excellent as Beth. At first, she seems the most stable and conventional of the three, but she gradually discovers a side of herself that she had kept hidden for years. She does not enter the criminal world only out of necessity; she also begins to enjoy the control, power and freedom she finds there. Beth is probably the most interesting character because it is never clear whether she truly wants her old life back or whether she can no longer stand the idea of returning to it.

Retta brings a great deal of humanity to Ruby. Her need to find money to help her daughter makes her decisions particularly easy to understand, even when they are not sensible. She is the character who most strongly retains a moral conflict, an awareness that every action has consequences and a fear of destroying everything she is trying to protect.

Mae Whitman, meanwhile, makes Annie the most impulsive and chaotic member of the group. She often makes incredibly frustrating choices, but she also brings energy, humor and vulnerability. Annie can behave like a teenager despite being a mother, and that immaturity repeatedly gets her into trouble. Even so, Whitman prevents her from becoming completely unbearable and helps us understand the insecurity behind her mistakes.

The friendship between the three women is the true heart of the series. They work because they feel like real friends: they support each other, argue, hide things from one another and sometimes come close to destroying their relationship. The chemistry between Hendricks, Retta and Whitman keeps the show alive even when the writing begins to repeat itself. Sometimes simply watching them argue in a car is enough to recover everything that makes the series enjoyable.

Rio, played by Manny Montana, also works extremely well. His relationship with Beth brings danger, tension and an obvious attraction that the series uses throughout much of its run. Rio represents the world Beth believes she can enter and leave whenever she chooses, although he is always there to remind her that she does not make the rules. The problem is that this dynamic continues for too long and eventually repeats the same threats, betrayals and reconciliations again and again.

That is the main weakness of Good Girls: eventually, it begins circling around itself. The women try to leave crime, make another terrible decision, need Rio again, create another plan, watch it fail and end up even more trapped than before. At first, this structure is entertaining because each new disaster seems bigger than the last. Over time, however, it starts to feel like a formula that the series itself does not know how to escape.

It is also frustrating that the main characters continue making very similar mistakes after gaining so much experience. It makes sense that they never become perfect criminals, because they would lose part of their charm, but some decisions eventually appear to exist only to keep the story going. Instead of genuinely evolving, the characters repeatedly return to the same conflicts.

The series never fully decides how seriously it wants us to take its crime story either. Sometimes it works as a light and outrageous black comedy. At other times, it wants to become a serious crime drama involving violence, consequences and moral dilemmas. That mixture is part of its personality, but it is not always well balanced. Some developments seem extremely serious for one episode and then nearly disappear to make room for the next problem.

Despite all this, Good Girls never becomes a bad series. Its three leads remain excellent, the dialogue retains plenty of energy and some of the original spirit that made the show so easy to watch is always there. Even during its most repetitive stretches, it still offers funny moments, tense situations and characters we have followed for too long to stop caring about them completely.

The unfortunate thing is that it had a brilliant foundation and could have gone much further. Its beginning was fresh, original and highly entertaining. There was a great story here about three women tired of living according to other people’s decisions, who find an unexpected form of power and independence through crime. But instead of allowing that idea to evolve, the series eventually becomes lost in increasingly complicated plans, repeated threats and characters seemingly condemned to make the same mistakes forever.

Good Girls remains funny, entertaining and fairly original, especially during its early seasons. It is easy to watch, and its three leads have more than enough charisma to carry it. But it eventually moves away from what made it special, leaving the feeling that, with clearer narrative direction, it could have become a much better series.