Good Girls review: NBC’s heist drama gets a 6/10
NBC canceled Good Girls in June 2021, three weeks before the final episode aired. The show got four seasons and 50 episodes, running from February 26, 2018 to July 22, 2021. That is a respectable run by any measure. It is also a run that never quite matched what the premise promised.
Good Girls was created by Jenna Bans. The series was executive-produced by Bans, Dean Parisot and Jeannine Renshaw for Universal Television. It follows three suburban Michigan mothers — Beth, Ruby and Annie — who rob a local supermarket to fix their money problems. The robbery works. Then the store manager recognizes Annie, and gang leader Rio, who was using the supermarket as a front to store and launder counterfeit money, takes an interest. The mothers end up in a series of gang heists, debts, secrets and familial crises.
That is a strong engine. The show just spends a lot of time idling.
Trailer, via Good Girls.
Christina Hendricks, Retta and Mae Whitman
The casting is the best thing about Good Girls, and it is not close. Christina Hendricks plays Beth Boland. Retta plays Ruby Hill. Mae Whitman plays Annie Marks. All three are doing work the material does not always deserve.
Hendricks gets the hardest assignment. Beth is the one who pushes the others into the robbery, and she is also the one who keeps finding reasons to go back. Hendricks plays that slide without announcing it. You can see Beth deciding, in real time, that she likes the person she becomes when things get bad. That is a specific and difficult thing to play.
Retta is the anchor. Ruby is the one with the most to lose and the clearest reasons, and Retta gives her a weight the scripts do not always write. Whitman gets the messiest arc as Annie, the youngest and the most reckless. She is also the one the show punishes most, which starts to feel less like consequence and more like a pattern.
The supporting cast does real work. Reno Wilson plays Stan Hill, Ruby’s husband. Manny Montana plays Rio, the gang leader. Lidya Jewett plays Sara Hill. Isaiah Stannard plays Ben Marks. Matthew Lillard plays Dean Boland, Beth’s husband, and he is very good at being a man who keeps making the wrong call and then acting surprised.
A heist, a boss and an FBI problem
The first season sets the terms cleanly. Three women, one robbery, one store manager who recognizes a face, one crime boss who sees an opportunity. The show is at its best when it keeps those four things in the same room.
The problem is that Good Girls keeps adding. The FBI enters the picture. Debts stack. Secrets stack. The women keep telling themselves each job is the last one, and the show keeps needing another season, so it keeps saying yes. By the later seasons, the original premise — three mothers who decide to stop playing it safe — has been buried under a pile of obligations that the show treats as new but that the audience recognized two seasons earlier.
The tone is the other issue. Good Girls is a crime comedy drama, and it wants to be funny and tense at the same time. Sometimes that works. Retta can land a line that cuts through a scene, and the show knows it. But the show also uses comedy to get out of corners it wrote itself into, and that gets old.
Cast changes and additions
The show went through real casting turnover. Kathleen Rose Perkins was originally cast as Beth in the pilot. She left the project, and the role was recast. Christina Hendricks was announced as her replacement on July 10, 2017. That is a decision the show got right.
Later additions: Jackie Cruz joined in a recurring role for the third season, announced September 17, 2019. Jonathan Silverman joined in a recurring role for the fourth season, announced November 13, 2020. Jordan Belfi joined in a recurring role for the fourth season, announced April 13, 2021.
| Season | Premiere | Finale |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | February 26, 2018 | — |
| 2 | — | — |
| 3 | — | — |
| 4 | — | July 22, 2021 |
The show’s run had a shape. It started strong, held through the middle, and then got cut off. NBC announced the cancellation in June 2021, after four seasons. The final episode aired July 22, 2021. That is a short window between the announcement and the ending, and the show did not get to write toward a finish.
What Good Girls gets right
The core idea is good. Three women who have been playing it safe their whole lives decide to stop. That is a real premise, and it is one that speaks to something. The show knows that the money problems are not the point. The point is that Beth, Ruby and Annie each get a version of themselves they were not allowed to have before.
When Good Girls remembers that, it works. The scenes where the three of them are together, figuring something out, are the scenes worth watching. Hendricks, Retta and Whitman have an ease with each other that sells the friendship without needing to explain it.
The show also gets the mechanics right, at least early. The supermarket robbery is small and specific. Rio’s operation makes sense as a business. The FBI thread gives the women a second pressure that is not just another man with a gun. For a while, the show is a machine with three moving parts, and it runs.
| Element | Good Girls |
|---|---|
| Leads | Three suburban mothers |
| Setting | Suburban Michigan |
| Tone | Crime comedy drama |
| Hook | One robbery, then consequences |
| Network | NBC |
That comparison is the show’s whole pitch, and it is a good pitch. It is also the reason the show struggles. A standard crime drama can reset every week. Good Girls cannot. Every robbery has to matter, every secret has to compound, and the show has to keep raising the stakes without ever letting the women actually get out. That is a hard machine to run for 50 episodes.
The verdict on Good Girls
Good Girls is a show with a great cast and a premise that it never fully trusts. The first season is the best one, because the first season is the only one where the women are choosing. After that, they are reacting, and the show mistakes motion for progress.
The cancellation was not a tragedy. Four seasons and 50 episodes is a full run. But the show never got the ending its best characters deserved, and the last season knows it. The final stretch is rushed in a way that reads like a production that knew the clock was short.
What holds up is the trio. Hendricks, Retta and Whitman are the reason to watch, and they are the reason the show got four seasons at all. If you watch Good Girls, watch it for them. The heists are fine. The crime boss is fine. The FBI thread is fine. The three women are the show.
That is not nothing. It is also not enough to make Good Girls more than a good idea with a great cast and a script that kept losing its nerve. The show wanted to be about women taking their power back. Too often, it was about women waiting for the next problem.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.