Last week, I developed a new morning-after-Weather-Vane-production ritual: I crashed on the couch, pulled up Hulu, and watched Good Trouble. It’s not excellent television by any stretch of the imagination, but it has all of the components of a show for people low on brain power. That sounds like damning with faint praise, but this show has become an incredibly pleasant part of my Thursday mornings.
Good Trouble follows sisters Callie and Mariana Adams Foster after they graduate from college and law school, respectively, and venture into the real world. They take on an intentional living community in Los Angeles, start new jobs that feature challenging coworkers, and have bouts of romantic drama of various kinds.
Good Trouble is a spinoff of the long-running show The Fosters. I’d never watched The Fosters, so had to do a quick Google search to determine the general plot. The drama features a couple, Stef and Lena, who raise four children out of the foster system. Two of these children are Callie and Mariana. Their family background appears frequently throughout the first few episodes of Good Trouble. In one episode, Callie and Mariana meet up with their brother from The Fosters. All three grapple with their relationships with the foster system as they make a new friend, also a former foster kid.
The show is fairly socially conscious, in keeping with the direction that Freeform, the television network, has taken. Callie clerks for a conservative federal judge, just as he receives a case in which a young black man is shot by Los Angeles police.
This episode clearly makes reference to other recent, heavily publicized shootings. Callie has to weigh her own convictions that the officer is guilty, while interacting with her coworkers who are sympathetic to the police officer.
Meanwhile, Mariana deals with being a young Latina woman in a workplace that proudy touts its diversity as a selling point while elevating young white men who treat Mariana awfully. This was the worst part of the show for me: Mariana’s young, entitled male coworkers are truly awful and made me want to throw something at my computer screen several times.
Like many other shows of its style, Good Trouble does a good job of recognizing and portraying the influence that social media has in our lives. Text conversations are frequently, and more importantly, not-awkwardly, portrayed on screen. Show writers emphasize the importance of Twitter in grassroots activism. In another heart-stopping scene, Callie loses her phone in a bathroom during a party as her judge repeatedly calls her.
The show handles time in an interesting and surprisingly effective way. Episodes often start with the fallout of a specific event, then pan back to the inciting event. Rather than being distracting or disjointed, this technique keeps viewers engaged and has continued to capture my attention for several episodes.
It is unfair to classify this show as time-wasting television unworthy of critical enjoyment. The show deals with many millennial-specific issues, ranging from hookup culture to new and challenging careers to family relationships in young adulthood.
I found myself cheering as I watched these sisters gracefully and awkwardly bumble through recent adulthood. If you’re looking for thought-provoking, charming, and easily-consumable television, then this is the perfect show to pick up. My only objection is that I have to wait every Wednesday for a new episode.
