'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.