Good girls gone so bad, it’s good.
BQB here with a review of NBC’s “Good Girls.”
If you read any of my drivel, 3.5 readers, then you know I despise network television. Rarely, if ever, do I get drawn in by its formulaic hackery.
For the longest time, I felt that way about this show. The ads made me roll my eyes. A TV show about three women who knock over a grocery store doesn’t seem like the stuff of great television. A bank, yes, but bank robbery has been done and maybe overdone on screens large and small, and seeing as how a supermarket stick-up, though awful, I’m sure, if you’ve ever survived one, isn’t exactly the caper of the century that could inspire multiple seasons.
So, I skipped it. Then, the other day I saw it was on Netflix and gave it a try. I was hooked and binged the whole thing in a matter of days. Talk about an unexpected gem.
The plot? Three suburban moms in Michigan, just outside of Detroit, are BFFs and coincidentally, all experience life ruining financial woes at the same exact time. Retta, the comedienne of Parks and Recreation fame is Ruby, a waitress who can’t afford her ailing daughter’s medical bills.
Christina Hendricks, she of Joan on Mad Men fame, is Beth, a stay at home mom who has just learned that her dumb husband, Matthew Lillard of live-action Scooby Doo fame, has drained the family’s finances buying gifts for his hot, young secretary, putting the family home at risk of foreclosure. Damn, that must have been some good pussy. Even so, if you are married to Christina Hendricks and cheat, you are one greedy son of a bitch.
Rounding out the trio is Mae Whitman, she of a lot of stuff you may or may not have seen fame but regardless, her ship has finally come in fame, Beth’s younger sister, Annie, a single mom raising perpetually bullied daughter Sadie while requiring the expensive services of a lawyer to fight her ex-boyfriend in a custody battle.
Depressed over their financial woes, these women do what any suburban mom friends do. They get together, talk out their troubles over wine and…oh yeah, they randomly decide to rob the grocery store that Annie slaves away at for minimum wage.
Amazingly, they get away with it, but that’s not the end. Bizarrely, and perhaps the greatest of many plot holes in the show that you’ll have to ignore, the supermarket was holding onto cash belonging to a street gang, because, you know, that’s something that corporate chain stores do, apparently.
Sidenote: You’ll also have to ignore the fact that the only one who could have been in on helping the street gang hide their ill gotten loot is the store’s pervy, creepo manager, Boomer (David Hornsby), he of Rickety Cricket on Always Sunny fame. At no time is it ever shown that he somehow helped the gang hide their loot. He seems as surprised as anyone else so whoever the supermarket employee who was helping the gang stow their cash is either a mystery to be solved at a later date or more likely, a little tidbit that was left on the cutting room floor. At any rate, Hornsby has long excelled at playing creepy weirdos, so kudos to him for landing a gig that lets me learn his name and not just “Hey, it’s Rickety Cricket!”
Long story short, the gang comes over the trio. They will have to set aside their motherly schedules of PTA meetings and playdates to commit more crimes just to cover up their initial crime and to appease gang leader Rio (Manny Montana), who, ironically, gets the least amount of screen time, is the least developed character and yet, is one of the more interesting characters in the series.
Eventually, the bad mommas realize they are good at committing crimes and once they are on Rio’s good side, they become his witting accomplices, raking in the cold, hard cash they need to solve their problems.
In a twist that seems too good for network TV, Ruby’s husband, Stan, (Reno Wilson), is a cop who keeps coming home with tales of the scary street gang that is raking in the dough as of late. One shudders to think that he and his wife might eventually find themselves at odds if Stan ever puts two and two together.
It’s fun. It’s silly. It strikes me as a sanitized for TV version of The Sopranos. There are bad paths the show could go down but then it couldn’t be watched by the non-cable masses.
It seems obvious that the show runners steer clear of getting the ladies involved in drug running. Instead, they get involved in stuff like counterfitting, money laundering, and botox thievery – all bad but nothing that will immediately lead to someone dying of a heroin overdose in a back alley…then again does it? You get the impression that Rio and friends aren’t exactly selling cookies, so they must be running large quantities of something highly illegal that will get people killed but ultimately, a trio of suburban moms pushing horse on a street corner is not the stuff of wacky comedy gold, so that is avoided, obviously.
STATUS: Surprisingly shelf-worthy. Come for the humor. Stay for Hendricks’ copious sweater stuffers…which sadly, are never set free for the world to enjoy. Maybe time to get this show transferred to HBO.
Bonus points for Netflix. Without them, I likely would have never given this show a chance. They do breathe new life into a lot of shows.
Bookshelf Battle 