Good Trouble

The Fosters was awesome on many levels, and after 5 episodes my list of favourite shows now includes Good Trouble. I guess we all want varying things from the dramas we watch - so long as the stories are character driven and allow for personal growth, and the main characters are likeable, I don't mind spending time with one or two people I would avoid in real life. Some of Callie and Mariana's new loft mates are a bit abrasive, and their workmates are ****s, but without conflict there would be no story. At the beginning of the pilot episode Callie and Mariana are in the same outfits and UHaul they were in at the very end of The Fosters.

Cierra Ramirez is exceptionally talented, has great comic timing (a gift), and never murdered a line in 5 seasons of The Fosters. She's the perfect person to play Mariana - set up by the writers with a propensity to stretch the truth or delude herself, and with no respect for anyone's secrets but her own. These flaws often are what keeps the stories moving. She makes up for these unforgivable traits by being fierce, whether protecting someone she cares about or cutting through other people's BS. Her breakthrough moments and her sense of fun are highlights, for me.

No, Callie has never seemed promiscuous or needy to me, but then I've never understood why anyone would expect most people to become attached, engaged and married happily ever after to only one person in a lifetime (unless the story is set in the 16th century or something). I'm in my 60s and happy for these characters to act their age - gosh, I might even learn something when one of them makes a mistake.

The pace of the storyline seems less frantic than The Fosters.

Another thing I don't understand is reviewers who whinge and moan about the show's "liberal" values. Well, duh! If they find it all so unbearable why on earth don't they watch something else? It's like smacking yourself in the eye so you can resent having hands.

The setting and sets for this series are just yummy, and the art theme is a bonus. The sequence in 01x05 involving the 1957 photo from Arkansas (see... no spoiler!) is typical of the occasional treats I've come to expect from these prducers. My only wish is that, as we are getting a lot of flashback sequences, writers would find a way to make this slightly less confusing. As on The Fosters, I sometimes find myself wondering, not where, but when we are, in a story.

I really wanted to like this show because I enjoyed The Fosters, but I'm struggling. Good Trouble? More like Bad Decisions. Callie and Mariana continue to make one bad decision after another and they have surrounded themselves with a whole menagerie of people who do the same. They are supposed to now be a law school graduate and an MIT graduate. If they made decisions like they continue to do now while they were in college, neither would have graduated or landed their jobs. The writers are letting them down by continuing to write them as the teenage girls they were rather than the women they should have become.

I love how vocal this show is about social issues and the fact it has so many diverse and interesting characters! But every episode I find myself skipping through at least 25% of it because it's either Callie having completely unnecessary intimate scenes, the made-up love triangle (which no one cares about) or screentime is wasted on her "lost in thought" about something that adds zero value to the story.. Mariana is meant to be the other main character but she gets half of Callie's screentime, while actually being charismatic and having something interesting to say. Give the rest of the characters the screentime they deserve and people might be more interested in this show!

I liked The Fosters mostly for its portrayal of a family led by two committed, married lesbians, living their lives. The focus was not just about them being gay. I will give Good Trouble kudos for continuing in covering the same types of important social issues and broad diversity of characters as The Fosters did. But Callie and Marianna? They have had zero character growth in 6 plus years of programming. They NEVER learn from their mistakes. They have made one bad decision after another, then when trouble follows, they lie or deploy avoidance/denial tactics. Every time. At the end of the day, all is forgiven and there are never any real consequences for years of bad choices. Success continues to be handed to them in spite of themselves. Surely they can be written as more complex and adult than this, after obtaining law and engineering degrees. I wanted to like this show, but have remained only to support the Alice/Joey storyline.

Look, I'm 62, and this series is definitely not targeting me. I'd say it's targeting 20-something women who want to watch spunky heroines overcome odds and have sex. And that's fine, because that's a market.

Even though I'm old, I do like some youth entertainment, like Euphoria or Impulse, but Good Trouble is pretty bubble-headed. I only took a look because I'd seen glowing reviews, but I found it pretty intolerable from the first 5 minutes.

Still, the thing's got lots of energy and cute leads (who look like high schoolers to me because everyone looks so damn young nowadays). So I won't say you should watch it, only that *I* shouldn't watch it.