Eight Years On, Good Girls Still Works Where Its Storyline Runs Long

Three suburban mothers rob a convenience store in the first episode of Good Girls and spend the rest of the season figuring out what to do with the money. NBC’s dramedy stars Christina Hendricks, Mae Martin, and Reno Wilson as Beth, Eve, and Rav, three women whose lives have stalled in the suburbs of Ohio. The premise is simple: they need cash, they take it, and the show spends six episodes watching the consequences pile up.

The robbery works. The aftermath does not.

Trailer, via Good Girls.

Beth, Eve, and Rav

Beth is the anxious planner, Eve is the impulsive instigator, and Rav is the quiet one who keeps the peace at home while his wife runs the family business. Hendricks carries the show with a performance that moves between desperation and deadpan humor. Martin and Wilson support her, but the script often gives them less to do than the story promises.

The show wants to be a dark comedy about desperation, but it leans hard on the desperation and softens the comedy. Episodes spend long stretches on the fallout from the robbery: ruined relationships, legal threats, and the slow unraveling of each character’s carefully constructed life. The humor is there, but it arrives late in scenes that start as tense and stay tense.

What Works

• The central robbery setup is sharp and pays off quickly.
• Hendricks’ performance anchors the series.
• The show knows exactly how to build tension in its first few episodes.

What Doesn’t Work

• The middle episodes drag as the plot stalls between robberies.
• Supporting characters get thin material.
• The show’s darker turns feel forced rather than earned.

The show’s best moments come early, when the stakes are fresh and the comedy lands. The worst moments come later, when the show has to sustain a story built on stolen money that refuses to resolve itself neatly. That tension between promise and payoff defines the whole series.

Good Girls is not a failure. It is a show that starts strong and coasts through its middle. The robbery is a great hook, but the show spends too long circling the consequences instead of letting the characters live with them. By the finale, the promise of a bold, funny crime story has given way to a slower, sadder portrait of three women who made a bad decision and are paying for it.

The show earns its 6.0/10. It has a strong cast, a sharp premise, and a willingness to make its characters suffer. It just never quite delivers the payoff that would make those elements add up to more than the sum of their parts.

Christina Hendricks · dramedy · Good Girls · NBC · TV Review