'The Girlfriend' Is a Prime Example of How Cheap Streaming Shows Have Become

Over the past decade, streaming platforms have increasingly claimed ownership of material typically found in anonymous airport paperbacks and Lifetime movies. These are scandal-driven tales of taboos, secrets, and betrayal, all couched within a sleek facsimile of domestic luxury and social ambition. Sure, there are critiques of class biases and snobbery; however, it’s only there to titillate the audience, to excite the thin character drama with bold and clear clashes between rich and poor, the establishment and the upstarts, the young (read: beautiful) and the old (read: jealous).

It does not make for substantial, thoughtful drama, but it can be devilishly entertaining so long as it’s built with rigor and pulled off with sparky style. The pieces are theoretically all there in the Amazon series The Girlfriend, all episodes of which drop at once on Prime Video. Cherry (Olivia Cooke) is a young London realtor from an ordinary working-class British background who falls for the swaggering Danny (Laurie Davidson), a young, wealthy upper-class boy training to be a trauma surgeon and set to inherit a fortune from his father’s hotel empire. 

The only problem is Laura (Robin Wright), his overly protective gallery owner mother, who quickly sizes up Cherry as manipulative, deviant, and altogether improper for her darling boy.

There is something instantly appealing about such broad melodrama – and fair play to The Girlfriend, it goes to some extremely dramatic places as Cherry and Laura battle over this completely innocuous and boring young man – but it is saddled with the cheapness inherent to this chapter in the streaming empire. Because The Girlfriend is built from a lurid “gawk at extreme wealth” impulse, luxury invades every frame, with most scenes taking place in incredibly sleek but impersonal London homes, hotels, and offices. But every shot, despite the digital pristineness of Amazon’s cameras, feels stagey and hollow.

No matter how shocking or sizzling the scenes get, directors Wright and Andrea Harkin shoot The Girlfriend with a tired, clunky energy that unintentionally reveals what the most important material is here – long shots of Cherry walking away smugly from a chaotic social situation, or a sudden violent blow to shatter the subdued, stilted tension and spin the drama towards a new tier of crazy. It’s like watching one long sizzle reel, or a series of clips tailored for the attention span and aesthetic demands of social media. 

Watching all six episodes of The Girlfriend (there is, at max, three hours of material here), the only lingering memories will be the appalling pop soundtrack and dresses, suits, and swimwear that high street retailers will be happy are getting decent advertising airtime. The term “guilty pleasure” may have fallen out of favor (let’s leave guilt out of our entertainment tastes), but there does have to be actual pleasure to qualify.

In adapting a novel by Michelle Frances, head writers Gabbie Asher and Naomi Sheldon lean on an alluring structural device – The Girlfriend switches between Cherry and Laura’s perspectives, sometimes retelling the same interactions with Rashomon-esque differences. When we are in Cherry’s head, Laura is rude and possessive; when we follow Laura, Cherry is a conniving and Fatal Attraction-level manipulatrice who wants what she must not have. 

The repetition inherent to this structure can be frustrating, but the suspicion that each character is telling their side of the story, and we will never get true, objective clarity, goes a long way in getting you through The Girlfriend’s detached-from-reality plotting.

Saddled with material that’s beneath them, Cooke and Wright do commendable work; each taps into a frustrated pathos in the scenes that are sympathetic to their perspective, and it’s delightful to watch them tap into more tyrannical impulses (reminiscent of each of their famous House shows; respectively, of Dragons and of Cards). This narrative subjectivity ends up feeling like window dressing, however, as The Girlfriend escalates its plot through a series of one-ups and low blow attacks that, unconvincingly, argue that Cherry and Laura’s lives are irredeemably ruined by the feud. 

It also doesn't help that Danny is such a non-entity: lacking the likeable, grounded charm of Cooke or the authorial power of Wright, Davidson struggles to engage us, and the extended battle for the approval of a wet blanket 20-something English guy feels like more trouble than it's worth.

In terms of scandalous plotting, The Girlfriend has one ace up its sleeve at the halfway point – an indefensible lie that matches the intensity of the Love Island-adjacent soundtrack and gives Cherry, Laura, and the audience a revealing insight into everyone’s wounded psychology. But as we trudge towards the inevitable final confrontations, everything feels doubly obligatory and lazy; gone is the ambiguity of a messy class-dependent rivalry in favor of an escalation of secrets that turn our characters into vessels for plot and shocked reaction shots. 

It may be borne out of a sincere and wicked desire to entrance us with tasty scandal, but the preposterous and haphazard The Girlfriend is the type of drama that you’ll pass on the chance to gossip about – this mess is none of our business.

All six episodes of The Girlfriend are streaming on Amazon's Prime Video from Wednesday, September 10, 2025.