Critical Condition: Good Girls

Good Girls | Netflix, from Tuesday

➢ “It’s a sleek, propulsive drama starring three misbehaving women lugging around stacks of cash and the occasional firearm; the cool criminality of it recalls TNT’s Good Behavior or USA’s Queen of the South, where the messy business of breaking the law is sweetened with a set of swanky shades and red lipstick. But Good Girls isn’t just wish fulfillment; if anything, it reads as a kind of cautionary tale, mixed with moments of droll humour. Desperate housewives make for terrible criminals, and the missteps of the three leads are both tragic and hilarious, in a tonal cocktail that is heady when balanced right and distasteful when misapplied.” — Variety.

➢ “Brisk, frequently funny, and set to a bouncy pop music beat, Good Girls settles into a comfortable rhythm in the first two episodes … It feels like there’s a built-in shelf life for Good Girls, but watching these frazzled moms use their hard-won problem-solving skills to get out of scrapes is a fun caper while it lasts.” — Entertainment Weekly.

➢ “Good Girls feels like a cable show squished into a network-shaped box, but it’s still generally more than watchable thanks to a trio of leading ladies — Christina Hendricks, Retta and Mae Whitman — who appear to be having a tremendous time playing funny, badass characters who are the focus of the show and not just wives or girlfriends.” — The Hollywood Reporter.

➢ “There are reasons, which quickly become apparent, that Good Girls is not called Breaking Bad Girls. But the surface parallels to Breaking Bad, the teacher-turned-drug-dealer drama, are tough to miss … The series, created by Jenna Bans, is tartly funny, less heavy than its cable kin and more concerned with righteous payback than ethical angst.” — New York Times.

➢ “While one could complain that we’ve seen this kind of story before, in Breaking Bad, Ozark, and even the lady-led Weeds, that’s far from the top problem facing Good Girls moving forward … There’s room — demand, even — for an empowering antihero drama on network TV that breaks bad from a woman’s point of view, but Jenna Bans’ attempt to speak to the reckoning’s frustrated and furious cultural climate is too uneven and unpolished to get the job done.” — IndieWire.