Related Articles
The newPrime Video miniseries The Girlfriend is about Laura, a well-to-do American expat living in London whose maternal instincts come out when her young-adult son Daniel starts dating Cherry, a working-class woman who’s clearly a gold digger, and possibly dangerous beyond that.
Wait, no. The new Prime Video miniseries The Girlfriend is about Cherry, a working-class English woman whose wholly sincere romance with her boyfriend Daniel is constantly being disrupted by his paranoid, overprotective mother Laura, with whom he has an unnervingly close relationship.
Actually, both descriptions are right — and wrong. The Girlfriend — starring Robin Wright, from House of Cards, as Laura, and Olivia Cooke, from House of the Dragon, as Cherry —splits each episode between the POVs of the two most important women in Daniel’s life, showing events from Laura’s perspective, then Cherry’s, or sometimes vice versa. It’s not a Rashomon-like tale of how people can see the same moments very differently, but rather an attempt to provide emotional context that the other one isn’t seeing. Each views the other as a threat to both Daniel and herself. But at least some of that conflict comes from false assumptions, and some of it comes from turning their preconceptions into self-fulfilling prophecies.
With this setup, and with two stars who have done well playing characters on their respective Houses with a great capacity for rationalizing their cruelty to others, The Girlfriendcould easily get away with going back and forth on the blame game for most of its six-hour length. Instead, the miniseries —adapted from Michelle Frances’ novel by Naomi Sheldon and Gabbie Asher — makes clear relatively early that even if both women are at fault, one of them is far more justified than the other in her level of mistrust.
That’s perhaps necessary for the kind of dynamic televised beach read The Girlfriend is aspiring to be, but it makes the middle chapters feel a bit unbalanced, before Sheldon, Asher, and their collaborators —including Wright herself directing multiple episodes, as she did in the later House of Cards years —get the story so on rails that it doesn’t matter who was initially the bigger danger. By that point, it’s a propulsive, dark, soapy story where it’s clear not everyone will walk away unscathed, if at all.
Laura and her hotel-magnate husband Howard (Waleed Zuaiter) have built a beautiful life for themselves and Daniel (Laurie Davidson), who’s wrapping up medical school when he brings Cherry home to meet his folks. Daniel had a sister who died when she was a little girl, and Laura has grown wildly overprotective and unusually close with him as a result. Some of their interactions resemble those of lovers more than a mother and son. So when Cherry shows up and is so obviously intimate with Daniel, Laura’s reaction seems as much warped jealousy as it does suspicion. But there’s also darkness in Cherry’s past, including an ex-boyfriend who has either terribly wronged her or been terribly wronged by her.
As the story pings between the two women, and from London to various exotic European locales that the family’s wealth gives Cherry access to, the conflict gradually evolves from simple microaggressions to far more hurtful and dangerous activities. Wright and Cooke both lean right into the emotionally heightened madness of it all, especially as Laura and Cherry’s cold war turns extremely, violently hot.
As the poor sap caught in the middle of this all, Daniel is largely a blank slate. On the one hand, the more time spent focusing on the two leads, the better. On the other, there comes a point where he doesn’t quite seem worth all the fighting, in the emotional or physical sense. But Wright and Cooke both understand the assignment, and the payoff to the rivalry feels worth the build-up. Not a deep story, but a fun one.
All six episodes of The Girlfriend begin streaming Sept. 10 on Prime Video. I’ve seen the whole season.
