Good Behavior: Seasons 1 & 2

97

I’m honestly a little bit at a loss about this show. It’s bad. Like bad bad. Like it started off on episode one and I was like, huh, this is pretty bad, but it’s a pilot and I can kind of see where they could go with it. So, I’ll stick with it for one more turn to see if it improves. It didn’t. Yet… yet, I watched a full two seasons of this family and personal drama masquerading as a crime drama. It went from the promise of a twisty caper series to a maudlin narrative about a damaged asshole trying to get her adolescent child back. In the blink of an eye. Seriously, you could have gone to the bathroom half way through the second episode and come back to a completely different — and suckier version of an already sucky — show. I thought, hey, I’ve read a couple Blake Crouch books, Dark Matter and Recursion. I’ve even seen a couple previous TV series adaptations of his work in Dark Matter and Wayward Pines. And while none of those were awesome, they at least made for an entertaining read and watch.

Man, I was wrong. First, those pieces of media were all sci-fi. Good Behavior is not even in the same universe. Which I knew, of course, but I was kind of waiting for lead,
Michelle Dockery, to walk into a time-travel closet during a heist and be transported back to a former life or something. It didn’t happen — but would have made for a way better show than we got. Instead, we have this troubled shoplifter and small-time scam artist who steals stuff for the thrill, and to sometimes buy booze and drugs. Even though she was just released from prison early based on her good behavior (get it?) she immediately goes back to stealing. It’s a compulsion, we get it. During one such caper, stealing stuff from a hotel room, the occupant comes back and she does the most cliche thing ever. She hides in the closet. But that’s just what she does because the writers of this thing clearly didn’t have enough creativity or care to make it not that. What she overhears is a hitman chatting about his plan to kill someone’s wife. That hitman turns out to be the dude she ends up spending the rest of the series with, Javier (Juan Diego Botto). Because, while she’s a thief, she doesn’t want to see people die. So, she tries to interfere and fails. But she gets in the way enough that she fucks up Javier’s game and he essentially kidnaps her to make her payoff fucking up his payday for the hit. Okay, fine, tension built.

But then… but then this couple, Letty (Dockery) and Javier, whose initial relationship is based on murder and thievery, turns into a weirdo co-dependent, psychological crutch for their past trauma and family issues. Mainly focused on Letty trying to get her son back, who is under the guardianship of her rough-around-the-edges, thrice-married mother, Estelle (Lusia Strus). Trying to get enough money to seem like a responsible adult. To her mother. To the court. Trying to stay sober to prove the same. All while shoplifting absolutely everything she needs, and, of course, traveling around with a contract killer who gets his jobs off the dark Web. As you can imagine, it’s 20 episodes of her crying and throwing herself around, falling off the wagon, getting caught stealing and various other nonsense that puts her potential guardianship of her child at risk. She’s not a good person. In fact, I’d go so far as to say her behavior is bad. Not good. Bad. And, frankly, she shouldn’t have the guardianship of a child. Absolutely not. Also, this isn’t the show I signed up for. And — how do I put this — the casting of the actor who plays her child, Jacob (Nyles Steele), is… not great. Jacob is black. Letty is a super-super-pale British lady. And, when we meet Jacob’s biological father, he is a relatively light-skinned black dude. I guess one-plus-one doesn’t equal two, so to speak. Which a couple characters mention during the series — because they too understand the absurdity of her saying this kid is biologically her child — but while I assumed at some point it would be revealed that he was adopted or somehow not actually her kid… He is. It’s just a weird casting choice. But not the oddest part of the show, which just kind of spirals into nonsesne.

First, Letty is not a very good thief. But I think we’re supposed to think she is? She seems to go back over and over again to the same hotel where she has some in with the front desk guy to steal watches and jewelry and cash from rooms. Which, of course, would be insanely dumb. As if people wouldn’t immediately report their stolen shit to the management and most likely blame the help. Which would also probably redound on the dude who gives out keys. Who is her contact. And then she comes back and does it again (and presumably has done it over and over). Each time she’s stolen enough that the cops would get involved, and after the third time, they’d clean house and probably get some sort of FBI squad in there. But none of that happens because this show just doesn’t care about details. Same with her shoplifting. She basically walks in with an empty shopping bag each and every time and clumsily loads clothes or whatever into the empty bag. So tricky. But, watching her, she would clearly be on cameras doing this, and nowhere she ever steals from — even the high-end clothing stores — ever seem to have cameras or security tags on anything. People just seem to let her walk out with shit. She lives in a world where her thievery is simple and dumb. And everyone seems to be clueless and blind. And, did I mention, her boyfriend murders people for a living? Who are we rooting for here, the dummy?

Sorry, I’m giving you the impression there is a POV here, or anything of value. There is a line uttered by Letty in this show: “All she wanted was molly and some college dick.” I physically gagged and reached for the remote. It’s shameful this level of poor writing. And then, when things really star to spiral the drain and they’ve run out of ideas, the thing just turns into a laughably shot early-nineties music video (complete with terrible slow-mo edits) while two of our characters wander around on a drug trip. It’s worse than it sounds. The writers were just like, “Hey, just say on page five ‘characters take drugs and a full song or two plays while we visualize their tip and then just leave pages six through twenty five blank. Alright, good work today, all!” And then, after everything moves toward what we hope is some sort of resolution, our lead, Letty — who has been throwing herself around for two seasons about her kid — suddenly gives up, basically forgets there’s a kid and moves on with seemingly little bother. Presumably this was done to shed that awful storyline for a season three that never happened. Which, honestly, is great for all of us. I understand Dockery is on some popular shows (that I haven’t seen), but her attempt to cover up her British accent creates an odd, stiff delivery in her lines that is jarringly not good. Perhaps it’s the lackluster writing as well, but her acting is both lazy and just plain off. She seems at times like she doesn’t want to be there. Mix that with Botto attempting attempting to wrap his mouth around English words that are probably not part of his normal vocab and you get two actors struggling to convincingly deliver the words on the page. There is nothing natural or lived-in in either of their performances. And while both of their characters are absolutely ridiculous, at least we have Terry Kinney and Ann Dowd to balance out the thing with some comedic chops and some humor in the miasma of head-shaking mediocrity. I knew it wasn’t just me when Ms. Hipster walked through the room on a couple different days, not realizing it was the same series both times, and asked twice, “Is this acting as bad as it sounds?” Yes, yes it is.