It’s all good

Three thieving mothers speak for themselves

Good Girls Airs Mondays, NBC

On TV these days, a Good Place is heaven, a Good Doctor is autistic and a Good Fight is inherently political. We’re up to here in shows with “good” in their titles, perhaps signifying an ongoing quest for virtue. Goodness doesn’t always prevail, circumstances sometimes ask us to be bad.

That’s the basic premise of NBC’s engaging, fed-up-with-sexism crime caper Good Girls (why girls?), who possess the easily ascribed attributes of their natural habitats. The first one, Beth (Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks), is a devoted wife and stay-at-home mom who has just learned that her car-dealer husband, Dean (Matthew Lillard), has been cheating on her and frittering away their life savings. The second is Beth’s sister, Annie (Parenthood’s Mae Whitman), a cash-strapped single mom who provides a safe space for her tweenager, Sadie (Izzy Stannard), to explore gender fluidity. The third, Ruby (Parks and Recreation’s Retta), is a hardworking wife and mother facing the staggering health-care costs of her daughter’s kidney disease.

The women, whose prior idea of a fun get-together was watching The Bachelor, hatch a scheme to rob the grocery store where Annie works as a cashier and suffers the torments of a lecherous boss (David Hornsby).

Wearing ski masks and brandishing realistic toy handguns, the women find the heist remarkably easy and the payoff suspiciously boffo: Instead of the $30,000 Annie expected to be in the storeroom safe, they’ve absconded with half a million.

Agreeing to lie low and let the police investigation die down, each of the women nevertheless splurges in a way that’s straight out of Intro to Philosophy: If you steal money to save a child’s life, does the immorality of the crime become relative?

That would be that, except Annie’s manager recognized her lower-back tattoo during the robbery and is threatening to call the cops unless she submits to his demands for sex. Problems escalate when a counterfeiting cartel, led by a menacing yet handsome thug named Rio (Manny Montana) comes looking for their missing lucre, which was being laundered through the grocery store.

What’s interesting here is how much a show about women learning to commit crime can share with a show about women trying to find the dreaded worklife balance: The struggle is real, but the more you talk about it and agonize over it, the less impressive it seems.