Good Girls: TV Review

And now it's time to get back to my 1st love...tv ❤, after reviewing all of those awards-bait Oscar movies.  First up is Good Girls, an interesting dark comedy airing Monday nights at 10pm on NBC. 

Starring 3 actresses from a trio of fan-favorite shows (Christina Hendricks from Mad Men, Retta from Parks and Recreation, and Mae Whitman from Parenthood and Arrested Development), the show follows 3 struggling moms who are desperate for more money to help keep their families afloat.  Beth (Hendricks) is a suburban mom of 4, married to a philandering car salesman husband (Matthew Lillard) and needing a nest egg so that she can leave him and start out on her own.  Beth's younger sister is Annie (Whitman), a single mom who works as a grocery store cashier; she needs money to fight her ex Greg (Zach Gilford, another fan favorite actor from the beloved Friday Night Lights), who is suing her for custody of their 11-year-old daughter Sadie.  Finally, Ruby (Retta) is Beth's best friend, a waitress struggling to pay for her daughter Lidya's expensive kidney disease treatments.  They jokingly talk about robbing the grocery store to solve all of their problems, until Annie convinces them to actually go through with it.  After a pretty funny robbery (Beth comforts a young girl in the store, while wearing a mask and carrying a gun, scaring her even more), the gang ends up with much more than the few thousand dollars that they had anticipated.  They begin spending their newfound fortune (Annie buys a sports car, Ruby takes Lidya to a high-end doctor), until a Mexican gang comes calling, angry that the women have taken over their territory.  Things just snowball from there, as the store's manager Boomer (David Hornsby) discovers that Annie was responsible for the crime and tries to blackmail and rape her (yeah, this is when it really gets dark).  The women try to get out of their hole, but things just get worse and worse.

This show is definitely not what I expected, but so far I'm liking it.  The strong cast elevates a pretty basic premise and mediocre writing.  The previews made it look more funny than dark, but it's really the opposite.  But I like dark shows, so I'm going with it.  Hendricks brings her strong female working-woman Joan character from Mad Men into the 21st century, really conveying Beth's sense of hopelessness about her predicament while also taking a feminist stand against her unhappy married life.  Whitman basically plays the same young spitfire character that we loved on Parenthood; she does a fine job here too, but there's nothing to show any additional range that we haven't already seen from her.  The biggest revelation on the show is definitely Retta.  She had a small role on Parks and Rec, serving as the sassy black woman who made snarky comments here and there.  She did it well, but that's pretty much all that she did.  Here, she shows a strong dramatic side that was never evident before.  Ruby's need to rob the store makes the most sense of the 3 women; she's just doing what needs to be done to help her daughter survive.  And Retta conveys Ruby's struggle with the range of a much more experienced actress.  In the second episode, the women are sure that the gang is about to kill them, and they each share heartbreaking moments with their families where they believe that they're saying goodbye.  These types of moments really show off the dramatic chops of these actresses.  While the show is clearly taking more of a dramatic than comedic path, I still wish that the writers would sprinkle some more jokes in here and there to lighten the mood a bit.  And after robbery, blackmail, attempted rape, attempted murder, and kidnapping, there's definitely a need for more lightness.  Even This is Us, the biggest tearjerker on tv, has its funny moments.  It's still early for Good Girls and it needs some time to find its voice, but so far I think that it's off to a promising start.  Check it out and give it a chance.