Good comedy easy to find
With all due respect to the fogeys, young and old, who will tell you there haven’t been any decent comedies on TV since Fawlty Towers, we really are living through an embarrassment of riches via our various platforms, providers and media.
Case in point, I don’t even think Good Girls is a particularly stand-out show. At least, not when you compare it to the very best of what’s out there at the moment.
But if you’ve already made it through Schitt’s Creek, Dead To Me, The Santa Clarita Diet – all on Netflix (stick with SCD, season two is way better) – Fleabag, and especially Better Things on Amazon or Lightbox (and also on DVD), and you’re casting around for your next favourite show, then maybe you should give Good Girls a thrash.
Good Girls is a spin of that oldest of comedy tropes: decent middle-class people find themselves living a life of crime.
From Breaking Bad to Bottle Rocket, it’s such a reliable and adaptable chassis to hang a show on, it’s not really any surprise that the makers of Good Girls manage to inject some truly funny material and situations into every episode.
Showrunner and writer Jenna Bans has been a producer and writer on some of the best of recent American television (Scandal, Grey’s Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, etc) and she brings some real storytelling smarts to a show that almost immediately transcends the cliches of the genre, and merrily goes its own way.
In the leads, as the working mothers who find themselves with half a million dollars in cash when they had only been expecting to score about $30,000 in a grocery store heist, Christina
Hendricks (Mad Men), Retta (Parks and Recreation), and Mae Whitman (Scott Pilgrim vs The World) bring years of experience and some fine chemistry to their roles, aided immeasurably by some dialogue that sparks, and does a lot more than just explain the plot to us.
There is a real writer’s sensibility to Good Girls that lifts it well above the expected.
And, as with a lot of good TV lately it seems, each series (so far) ups the ante on the last.
Or, for something as far from comedy as possible, the Netflix series The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez, a compelling examination of the systemic failure at every level that led to an 8-yearold boy’s death while he was living in the house of his mother and her boyfriend.
This is a shocking, sometimes sickening, documentary series, but it is made with respect and an absolute absence of sensationalism or exploitativeness. Recommended.