“The Girlfriend” is the biggest fraud in recent TV memory. It wears its influences like a badge of honor, but don’t be fooled by its hot young stars, exotic locations and high production values. Beneath the surface, there is an extraordinary amount of nothing.
Laura Sanderson (Robin Wright, “House of Cards”) is a wealthy London art gallery owner and doting mother to her son Daniel (Laurie Davidson, “A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story”). Daniel’s got a new girlfriend, Cherry (Olivia Cooke, “House of the Dragon”), and she’s got everything going for her. She’s a successful real estate agent that is also smart, funny and beautiful. But Laura knows something’s up with Cherry. She lies about having attended a prestigious secondary school, loves to spend Daniel’s money and (GASP) can’t play tennis. Laura is determined to keep Daniel and Cherry apart.
The two views above encapsulate what it’s like to watch an episode of “The Girlfriend.” The show is told from the perspective of both women, with the first half of each episode highlighting one’s perspective and the second recapping the same events from the other’s. It is a miniseries about two women fighting over the most important man in their lives through increasingly high-stakes humiliation, backstabbing and cancelling. It’s a fun premise, but it ultimately suffers from horrible execution.
Cherry and Laura are both liars, but not particularly skilled ones. The two construct unbelievable lies — fabricating a character’s death, creating fake social media posts in the other’s name, etc. — that are easy to pick apart with any level of critical thinking. Instead of being strung along for a nail-biting ride, desperately trying to figure out how these two characters will hurt each other next, the viewer sits back, waiting to see how the next in a series of convoluted schemes will fall apart. “The Girlfriend” is not a high-wire act; it’s a series of increasingly implausible falls.
If “The Girlfriend” was aware of how dumb its central characters are, it might derive some humor from the comical failures of its antiheroines. But the show takes itself religiously seriously: In ping-ponging between the perspectives of Cherry and Laura, the show attempts to shift our sympathies as well. In Laura’s sections, we are expected to see Cherry as a manipulative gold-digger, while in Cherry’s sections, we are expected to see Laura as a smothering prude. “The Girlfriend” wants, more than anything, for us to relate to both characters at once, with each segment framing interactions differently in order to force us to consider both women’s perspectives. Unfortunately, it never feels like anything more than a cheap gimmick.
Worse than being blatantly manipulative, it’s poorly structured and even more poorly executed. The show rushes through the second half of every episode, playing music over irrelevant dialogue and only slowing down for moments in which Laura and Cherry experience an event in markedly different ways. It plays as if the show is embarrassed by its perspective-swapping, a gimmick which would have been unnecessary if the show was capable of writing better characters, or at least functioned as a simple thriller.
Aside from the terrible writing, everything else in the show is fine. Laura, Cherry, Danny and the show’s perfunctory supporting cast spend two episodes in Malago, and the camera department gets the opportunity to shoot naturally beautiful locations with no depth, flat studio lighting and boring compositions. There are a few sex scenes, including a pretty grossly porn-y recreation of the balcony scene from “Romeo and Juliet,” but Davidson and Cooke have so little chemistry that the scenes get by more on their (pretty low) shock value than any real eroticism.
“The Girlfriend” is the sort of show that was designed by a marketing committee and formed by studio executives who watched better works succeed before telling writers to “Do that!” It’s so infuriatingly tepid that the only true moments of joy come from watching characters make mistakes, fail in their schemes and deliver bad dialogue. It won’t turn you on, thrill you or leave you with anything to think about. Watch “Challengers” or “Gone Girl” or “The Talented Mr. Ripley” instead. Watch a young couple get into a fight in public. Go for a run. Read a book. I don’t care. Just don’t waste your time with “The Girlfriend.”
Daily Arts Writer Jack Connolly can be reached at jconno@umich.edu.
