NBC puts down Good Girls, and Netflix refuses to pick it back up
The series starred Christina Hendricks, Retta, and Mae Whitman as suburban moms breaking…not good?
The cast of Good Girls—and specifically, stars Christina Hendricks, Mae Whitman, and Retta—will now have to be good on their own time, as NBC has formally canceled the series after its fourth season. To add insult to injury, Netflix (which co-funded the show, originally presented as a new, mainstream-network-friendly twist on the Breaking Bad/Weeds “suburbanite gets too into doing crimes” genre) has apparently also declined to pick the series up for a fifth and final season.
Once seen as a sort of last-chance saloon for shows that were lost, wayward, or—to put none-too-fine a point on it—just straight-up canceled, Netflix has stepped back from its reputation as a television savior in recent years. Notably, it declined to order up a third season of similar NBC casualty Manifest, despite loudly touting that the show was one of its most-watched after it was recently added to its streaming catalog.
In the case of Good Girls—which has always done better on delayed viewing than in its low-performing linear ratings—the snub has to be viewed in the context of Netflix’s unique relationship with the show. Originally developed back in 2017 (i.e., right before every major network realized it was about to have its own streaming service, and, thus, a robust need for a library of its own cheaply available original content), Good Girls was paid for in part by the streaming service, in exchange for having essentially free reign to its streaming rights. Which means, among other things, that there was no chance of it getting a final season on Peacock, and, apparently, no chance of it continuing at Netflix, either.
The series starred Hendricks, Whitman, and Retta as a trio of moms who decide to rob a grocery store to pay their various bills, with that one dangerous decision snowballing into several others, as one does. But despite an obviously stellar cast, the series never seemed to be able to pick up proper momentum (or, apparently, enough of audience for NBC to keep it around to finish out its proposed run).