Prime Video’s Half-Baked Thriller Starring Robin Wright & Olivia Cooke Is One You’ll Instantly Forget
Prime Video’s new thriller TV show, The Girlfriend, bites off more than it can chew, adding another forgettable series to an oversaturated genre. Bringing to life the novel of the same name by Michelle Frances, The Girlfriend is obviously a literary adaptation in style and structure, using the characters’ points of view to skew how the audience sees the story. In its attempts to be scary, sexy, and shocking in equal measure, The Girlfriend succeeds in confusing the viewer and presenting a narrative that escalates for seemingly no reason.
Olivia Cooke and Robin Wright lead the cast of The Girlfriend, with Wright lending her talents as a director to several episodes throughout the season. The pair play Cherry Laine and Laura, the girlfriend and mother of Danny, played by Laurie Davidson, who slowly tear each other apart in an attempt to bring themselves closer to him. Instantly leaning into the psychosexual dynamic and enmeshment present between Laura and Danny, The Girlfriend engages with some interesting and evocative conversations, but ultimately comes up empty when it tries to make any deeper points.
The Girlfriend Attempts To Repackage Tired Thriller Tropes
Unfortunately, The Series Falls Victims To The Classic Pitfalls Of The Genre
Like almost every other thriller TV show we’ve seen come out in the past five years, The Girlfriend uses discussions of class and wealth disparity as a way to circumvent any nuanced cultural or social criticism. The show’s commentary on the ultra-rich and the way they wield their power is surface-level at best. Especially considering the way Cherry is ultimately characterized and her position as the representation of the underclass. The influences of other class thrillers, namely The White Lotus, drip from every scene of The Girlfriend, making it impossible not to feel as if we’ve seen this all before and done better.
The most interesting part of The Girlfriend is the way the series significantly alters events when switching between Laura and Cherry’s perspectives. Through the eyes of each woman, events happen differently, making the audience consistently question what’s real, what’s imagined, and what version of reality is closest to the truth. The unreliable narrator is a classic facet of fiction, especially in the thriller genre, but The Girlfriend doesn’t use this device to its full potential. The moments when The Girlfriend leans on Cherry and Laura’s position as foils and the actress’s chemistry make it interesting, but this isn’t often.
Wright and Cooke are far more dynamic to watch onscreen together than Cooke and Davidson, as Davidson’s Danny is lukewarm as the object of these women’s affections. Of course, part of the point of The Girlfriend is how clearly nothing Danny is as a character, son, and partner. It’s his social capital and the women’s past traumas that fuel their desire to possess him and the safety he represents, even though, as a person, he couldn’t be more boring. Again, here, The Girlfriend begins to tackle a conversation that would bring the series closer to originality, but the show fails to follow through, keeping Danny surface-level and pathetic.
Conversely, the women become increasingly terrifying. By trying to make Cherry and Laura equally unhinged and fallible, The Girlfriend makes them both unknowable and further clouds its already confusing tone. One of the biggest problems with thriller shows today is that when everyone is a villain and everyone is punished, it becomes increasingly difficult to uncover what the story is actually trying to say. However, by the end of the show’s debut season, the takeaway seems to be that the narrative has no point of view at all. Attempts at further interrogations are shot down in favor of spectacle whenever possible.
We Don’t Know The Characters Well Enough To Believe Their Unhinged Actions In The Girlfriend
The Girlfriend Never Lets Us Into The Characters’ Hidden Worlds
One of the hardest lines to walk for any thriller is balancing the mystery and intrigue of the characters with enough development and characterization to make their motivations tangible. However, in the same way the class commentary falls flat, so does the believability that Cherry would be so quick to put herself in terrible positions for the sake of the security that a rich man offers. Similarly, Laura’s charmed life and her boundaryless relationship with her son are justified through a singular point of grief that the series uses as a device too many times for it to feel meaningful.
Like every other series hoping to get a season 2 renewal, The Girlfriend wraps up its story only to unravel this work with a last-minute loose end that’s just a little too thin to justify a return to the world of the show. While the series is a step above some of the most half-baked thrillers we’ve seen Prime Video put out, ie. We Were Liars, the characters are just as surface-level at the end of the show as they were at the beginning of The Girlfriend, making it hard for me to believe that anyone will be willing to follow them down another rabbit hole.
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