Photo: Christopher Raphael/Prime

Spoilers follow for The Girlfriend, all six episodes of which premiered on Prime Video on September 10, as well as previously released series The Hunting Wives and Sirens.

In The Girlfriend, the truth is malleable, open to change based on our biases, judgments, whimsies, and desires. To Robin Wright’s multimillionaire gallery owner Laura, her son’s new girlfriend is a sleazy opportunist, a gold digger who lies about her academic and professional credentials and goads Laura by going down on Daniel (Laurie Davidson) in Laura’s house with the door open. To the ambitious and working-class Cherry (Olivia Cooke), Laura’s a helicopter mom who can’t let her 27-year-old son make his own decisions and who treats Cherry like shit on the bottom of her designer shoes. Somewhere between their two perspectives might be reality, and The Girlfriend invites us to make our own decisions by splitting each of its six episodes into halves contrasting Laura’s and Cherry’s experiences of the same events. These two women of different generations, temperaments, and socioeconomic brackets can’t see eye to eye on anything, but the cleverness of the limited series’ Rashomon-style approach is how it keeps us switching between thinking about either Laura or Cherry, Oh hey, this woman is sympathetic and Oh hey, this woman is a crazy bitch.

This adaptability applies to The Girlfriend itself: On one level, it’s a gloriously scummy romp of escalating drama, all seething insults, nefarious online catfishing, and gorgeously displayed cleavage. On another, it’s a keen analysis of feminist intersquabbling and an exploration of what happens when established women tell their younger counterparts to grab their futures with both hands then get frustrated when they do just that — and end up replacing their elders. The Girlfriend is far more clever than you might expect, the latest entry in a summer of high-trash TV series (complimentary) that center white women striving, lying, fighting, and fucking their way to self-actualization. Alongside The Hunting Wives and Sirens, The Girlfriend creates a triptych of women behaving badly because they can — and also because sometimes, in this era of late-stage-capitalism stagnation and social decay, it’s the only way to get ahead.

The Girlfriend is based on Michelle Frances’s 2017 same-named novel, but like Prime Video’s The Better Sister before it, it takes significant liberties with the thriller, including an entirely different ending. The series begins with a violent fight followed by a “five months earlier” chyron that takes us to when Daniel and Cherry began dating. The Girlfriend sets the competitive tone between the two women immediately, with Laura bristling at Daniel telling his mother that she reminds him of Cherry, rather than Cherry reminding him of her, and Cherry overhearing Laura making jokes about her name and whether she’s a stripper. Neither of them understands the other’s dynamic with Daniel, and the split-episode format keeps our sympathies teeter-tottering between each woman. For the first three episodes, their sniping at each other is constant, but not quite deranged — until Cherry fails to properly belay Daniel during a rock-climbing trip and he falls off a mountain. As Daniel lies unconscious and broken in a hospital bed, the doctors warn Laura and her husband, Howard (Waleed Zuaiter), that their son probably won’t make it. He miraculously does, but Laura doesn’t pass that information along to Cherry. Instead, she tells Cherry that Daniel died and tells Daniel that Cherry broke up with him because she couldn’t handle taking care of him, hacks Cherry’s Instagram account to post a xenophobic message that gets her fired from her real-estate job, and evicts Cherry from the flat she was living in with Daniel. She straight up ruins Cherry’s life and then goes to brunch with Daniel and has sex with Howard on the grounds of their palatial Spanish villa. Laura’s a boomer succubi rejuvenating herself with Cherry’s millennial blood.

As Laura, Wright is given the opportunity to move between the soft romanticization of Forrest Gump’s beloved Jenny (blissful smiles whenever she’s with Daniel or her secret lesbian lover) and the diamond-edged grit of Claire Underwood (crossed arms, a hard stare, and a standoffish affect). She’s matched wonderfully by Cooke, who leans into her actual Manchester accent to give Cherry a stroppy, sarcastic bent and whose body looks absolutely banging wrapped in an array of oxblood, maroon, and cerise minidresses. Wright and Cooke are so effective at the mercurial demands of their characters — gentle warmth one minute, snarling viciousness the next — that you’ll nod along to whatever wild decisions Laura and Cherry make as the women move past polite dislike to active hatred. When faced with Laura’s hostility, what can Cherry do but lose her mind, smash a glass against her head, and tell Daniel that his mother did it? When faced with Cherry going berserk, what can Laura do but visit Cherry’s mother and learn that Cherry nearly killed her dad and ruined an ex-boyfriend’s wedding by filling his cake with raw pig parts? Laura, who is devastated to learn that Howard has been secretly propping up her art gallery for years by pressuring his friends to buy her pieces, seemingly worries that the same thing will happen with Daniel supporting Cherry — but the difference in Laura’s mind is that she never asked for help and is therefore more righteous than the clearly grasping Cherry.

All of that lying, manipulation, and judgment leads to the series finale, in which Laura has secretly recorded Cherry’s mother describing her violent past and aims to share the audio with Daniel, until Cherry shows up at their family home. As the two women grapple throughout the mansion in the fight from the series’ opening moments, Laura’s phone gets knocked under a piece of furniture, Daniel only sees Laura attacking Cherry and goes to save his fiancée, and he ends up accidentally drowning his mother in their home pool. Cherry and Daniel are both horrified by what he’s done, but on some level, of course, Cherry is pleased. In the finale’s final minutes, we see that Cherry and Daniel are married, she’s pregnant, and they’ve formed a new family unit with the supportive Howard. Everything seems to be straight out of Laura’s worst nightmare — until Daniel comes across his mother’s phone, charges it, and watches her last video message to him. After Laura describes herself as getting “the truth for you,” Daniel listens to Cherry’s mother describe his new wife, a warning that plays over footage of Cherry in the garden, her body now as ripe as her name: “When she has her sights set on something, you better not interfere, or God help you … don’t be fooled by the good times. Sooner or later, she’ll want something from you that you’re not prepared to give. And then, well. She’ll find a way to get rid of you.”

It’s amusing when Ava Max’s 2020 song “Sweet But Psycho” starts playing over the end credits, because if anyone is “poison but tasty,” it’s Cherry. But ultimately, The Girlfriend comes down on Laura’s side of things after all: She was right to try and protect Daniel from this opportunist, no matter what, and she paid the ultimate price for her maternal decency. The details are quite different from the novel’s ending, in which Cherry tries to kill Laura by shoving her down a hole and ends up falling to her death instead after Daniel saves his mother; Laura survives, and she has to live with the fact that “She could have saved Cherry. Maybe. She’d put her arm out. Made contact. But not in order to pull her toward safety. No, to push her toward the dark depths below.” Yet the series and book share the suggestion that Laura was justified in shielding Daniel from this sexually forward, professionally assertive young woman who should have known her place and stayed there. 

The Girlfriend luxuriates in the muck, in the macabre hilarity of Cherry cheerily tossing Laura’s cat out a window, the awkwardness of Laura interrupting her son’s joint masturbation session with Cherry, the titillation of Cherry making eye contact with Laura as she makes out with Daniel, and the mad-eyed vitriol with which each woman tries to drown the other. But hiding underneath that sleazy genre play is genuine tension regarding how to address the hunger of womanhood broadly and youth specifically. In that way, The Girlfriend joins Sirens and The Hunting Wives in depicting how marriage as an institution still implicitly treats women as property — even the ones who’ve made it into mansions, yachts, and luxurious London flats — and explicitly encourages generational infighting.

Like The Girlfriend, Sirens stars an actress who has been famous since the 1990s as a respectable member of the one percent who’s also hiding a checkered sexual history and an up-and-coming House of the Dragon star playing a younger woman clawing her way up the social ladder and getting closer and closer to what her senior might not want to share. In this case, it’s Julianne Moore as Michaela “Kiki” Kell, a former lawyer who left her career after marrying billionaire Peter (Kevin Bacon). Peter cheated on his first wife with Kiki and is often away for work, leaving her to run their clifftop estate and bird sanctuary with personal assistant Simone (Milly Alcock) by her side. Kiki positions herself as an unholy mixture of mother, mentor, and best friend to Simone, and the two dress, talk, and act alike; when they stretch together before a run, their limbs entwined around each other, they’re impossible to tell apart. For Michaela, Simone’s mimicry is reassurance that she’s been living in such a glamorous and appealing way that a younger woman couldn’t help but want to be just like her. When Simone decides to grasp Kiki’s life for herself by starting an affair with Peter, though, Michaela’s beatific facade slips.

Like Laura bristling at Cherry taking her place by Daniel’s side, Michaela’s fury at Simone’s striving is twofold. There’s the fact that Simone betrayed her by accepting Peter’s overtures, and therefore treated Michaela in the same dismissive way that Michaela once treated Peter’s first wife. And there’s also the suggestion that Michaela believes Simone is betraying the feminist cause by settling at such a young age for the role of plus-one to a wealthy man who treats his relationships like a transaction. It wasn’t a problem for Michaela when Simone worked for her, spraying her designer underwear with lavender mist and helping her sext Peter. (High trash, remember?) But Simone superseding Michaela in the Kell-family food chain — essentially getting a promotion over her — reminds the older woman that she’s not really Peter’s wife. She’s his employee, a person who smiles on his arm at events and helps sell to the world an image of benevolent philanthropy that papers over all the nefarious stuff he gets up to as a billionaire. “I work for him. We all do,” Michaela says, reminiscent of Laura learning that Howard has been paying her bills at the art gallery by facilitating her sales. Kiki’s whole ideology is about “letting go of what doesn’t serve you,” but what she never considered is that one day she’d be the one being let go, from her relationship and from her work.

At first, The Hunting Wives doesn’t seem to exactly fit this woman-replacing-woman pattern, since its primary relationship is between the liberal, tightly wound Sophie (Brittany Snow) and the nominally Republican, blisteringly confident Margo (Malin Åkerman), who can barely keep their hands off each other once they start an affair. Every situation these two find themselves in is sexually charged: skeet shooting, a driving lesson, spin-the-bottle with high-school boys that neither should be hanging out with. The image of Margo and Sophie sharing a cigarette in a bed under an arching headboard that evokes one of Georgia O’Keefe’s lush vaginal flowers is wonderfully on the nose; it’s almost as good as the show’s literal cliffhanger ending. In addition to all that sapphic scintillation, though, The Hunting Wives also has a domineering rich mom chafing against her son replacing her in his affections, and most interestingly, also treats marriage as a business proposition with an unbreakable glass ceiling, even for a woman who secured her place by kicking a rival down. Like that of Michaela in Sirens, Margo’s backstory is of the homewrecker variety; she was a sex worker whom wealthy oil tycoon Jed Banks (Dermot Mulroney) and his wife Sienna (Lauren Bowles) invited into their bed for a threesome. It didn’t take very long for Margo to supplant Sienna, marry Jed, and end up queen of the manor; it also didn’t take very long for her and Jed to agree on an open-marriage dynamic in which they can each sleep around. But again, this is marriage as control: Jed finances Margo’s life but expects her to go along with everything he wants, whether that’s his decision to run for governor or his mandate that she not sleep with other women. Sophie, then, is a threat to Margo’s marriage not in that she’d replace her by seducing Jed but in that she’d encourage Margo to be herself. And that’s not something Margo can afford to do, not when Jed’s saying things like, “Look around at everything I’ve given you. You’re here to make my life better.”

Interrogating marriage as an archaic institution in which masculine dominance is reified and gender roles are codified isn’t a new thing. Neither is the notion of women fighting over resources and opportunities; the femmes fatale of classic Hollywood noir were all about this, from All About Eve onward. What The Girlfriend, Sirens, and The Hunting Wives accomplish, though, is a melding of high and low art that in this current era of western-cosplaying and IP-chasing TV feels more and more rare. These series reject the streamer bloat of our last decade and rip through story, embracing the breakneck pacing and dynamic rhythms of soap operas while also plunging into of-the-moment anxiety over backsliding feminist gains and uncertainty about exactly what kind of womanhood is aspirational. By blending the fantastical wish fulfillment of characters like Cherry and Simone with the queasy concerns of Laura and Michaela, these series create conflicts that are incredibly entertaining to watch and operate as more than just simple catfights — there are questions of money, identity, and age that The Girlfriend, Sirens, and The Hunting Wives are asking us to consider alongside their melodramatic plot machinations.

The Girlfriend and Sirens both skew slightly conservative in their final “be careful what you wish for” messaging, with Laura and Michaela both coming out looking like Cassandras whose warnings were ignored. As finite limited series, they each end in a definitive way that reinforces the material gain but moral cost of being a woman who benefits from shoving another aside. Along with the hopefully soon-renewed The Hunting Wives, though, these series find resonance by grappling with the limits to which a woman can rise as a lover, an employee, and an individual in a system that still so often defines a woman’s worth by the man at her side and that pits women against each other for that top spot. “Your time will come,” Cherry’s boss condescendingly says to her when he promotes her colleague Pandora because of the connections Pandora’s wealthy mother will bring to their agency. For better and for worse in the high-trash cornucopia of The Girlfriend, Sirens, and The Hunting Wives, that time is now.