In both, we watch the main characters morph from ordinary, well-intentioned members of the community to murkier, more sinister criminals who willingly — even happily — do terrible things. Where Breaking Bad is about drugs, Good Girls is about robbery and money laundering. But this contrast itself makes it worth interrogating our concept of what is classified as prestige and why — because the biggest difference between these shows is that Breaking Bad is about men and almost revels in toxic masculinity at times, while Good Girls is about women and, amongst other things, the way that such toxic masculinity unravels their lives.
The show leans into the frivolous and feminine, not just in tone, but in character and plot, too. It takes assumptions and stereotypes about womanhood and motherhood and cracks open the layers contained within them, and the power they can hold.
The three women use that to their advantage and are able to evade suspicion many times over. The crimes the women commit and the way they carry them out are also grounded in the feminised world.
They launder their money through shopping at big box stores, enlist the help of other women in a pseudo-multilevel marketing scheme, and utilise their knowledge of beauty products, baking, crafts and literal laundry to print money. Except Jacobson and Glazer, united by their love of getting high and their love for each other, were funny all the time.
The New York they lived in looked like the one inhabited by Lena Dunham but it was free from anxiety, depression and pretension. Broad City was also multicultural, a failing of Girls that Dunham and co-creator Konner have admitted to and apologised for. It would be reductive to label Insecure the black Girls but, like Dunham, Rae writes, directs and stars in her show.
At their hearts, all these shows revolve around relationships. But two series that debuted towards the end of last year take the types of characters and the environment synonymous with Girls and use them to move in a different direction.
Search Party effortlessly pulls off a tricky balancing act. In her real life as an activist, an author, a public personality and a prolific social media presence, Lena Dunham has become an object of ridicule.
She hears the criticism, tried to address it and often apologises. I wish the thing people would admire about her more is how much she is trying to grow publicly. But in her creative life, Dunham has accomplished a great deal in a comparatively short time.
Her influence has freed up other performers from the constraints of what a female-driven comedy is expected to look like. But not too much. Photograph: HBO. Lena Dunham: 'We're doing the Girls movie'. This year, they nearly committed murder—and their decision not to kill Boomer David Hornsby , the slimy supermarket manager who threatened to rat them out to the FBI, comes back to haunt them. Now they have an extra corpse, the still-alive Boomer to take care of, and the feds on their tail anyway.
If Good Girls has become a more fascinating show by digging into and raising questions about morality, it has also, this season, more deeply probed the costs of female ambition. Since discovering her talent for crime, Beth has developed an appetite for a more thrilling existence.
By the back half of the season, Beth feels trapped: She craves more than the life she thought she wanted, but wanting more hurts the life she built. Ruby and Annie, too, have had deeper, meatier arcs this year. Ruby comes close to betraying her friends, while her husband, Stan Reno Wilson , compromises his job as a cop by tampering with evidence to protect her.
She wins it back just in time: Sadie Isaiah Stannard , in a tender scene, comes out as a transgender boy—a groundbreaking moment for trans representation, especially for network TV.
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