Prime Video’s The Girlfriend, adapted from Michelle Frances’ 2017 novel, is the kind of high-gloss, high-stakes drama that hooks you from its opening shot and doesn’t let go. Across its six tense episodes, it asks a deceptively simple question: when a new partner enters a family, is the perceived danger real, or all in the mind?
At the centre of this intoxicating miniseries is Laura, played with poise and quiet ferocity by Robin Wright. A glamorous career woman with the trappings of perfection – handsome husband (Waleed Zuaiter), sprawling Victorian home, and an adoring son, Daniel (Laurie Davidson) – she is blindsided when Daniel brings home his new girlfriend, Cherry. Played by Olivia Cooke, Cherry, with her dyed-red hair, low-cut dress and jarring PDA with Daniel, is everything Laura is not. From the moment the two women meet, sparks fly, but not the good kind.
It’s a familiar battlefield: the boy-mum confronted with the interloper threatening to “steal” her precious only son, with whom she has an uncomfortably close relationship. Anyone who’s watched a protective parent bristle at a new partner will recognise the psychology at play, but The Girlfriend pushes it into operatic territory.
Much of the genius of the show lies in its shifting perspectives. One moment, we see Cherry through Laura’s suspicious eyes: a manipulative social climber who might have stolen her jewellery and is using her son. The next, the lens shifts, showing Cherry as the working-class outsider navigating a minefield of judgement in an alien, upper-crust world. By constantly forcing the audience to re-evaluate, the show generates a compulsive sense of unease.
It is high-camp melodrama at its best. The first episodes open with a heart-stopping prologue – a drowning, a break-in, a hospital dash – that cranks up the tension before rewinding to domestic drama. Think White Lotus or Saltburn: rich people in lavish houses, their carefully curated lives undone by one outsider’s arrival. This is television at its most addictive: sexy, dramatic, and dripping in excess.
It isn’t pure frivolity, though. There is class commentary throughout: Cherry’s resentment of Daniel’s world – “all they have to do is breathe and everything comes to them” – is potent. Her butcher’s-daughter background makes her both the underdog we want to root for and the potential saboteur Laura fears. Meanwhile, Laura and her friends drip with privilege, their suspicion of Cherry as much about status as it is about genuine danger.
The Girlfriend revels in the decadent pleasure of watching hot, privileged people implode in lavish settings. It also leans heavily into the sexual chemistry between Daniel and Cherry. Their scenes together are hot, messy, and compulsively watchable, fuelled as much by raw attraction as by the allure of Cherry clawing her way into a world that doesn’t want her.
The performances are uniformly excellent. Wright is magnetic, walking a fine line between maternal concern and suffocating possessiveness. Cooke, meanwhile, delivers a star turn: slippery, charismatic, and fascinating. Her Cherry veers between vulnerable victim and dangerous femme fatale, keeping both Laura and the audience guessing at every turn. Their dynamic sometimes feels as much seduction as rivalry.
If there’s a weak link, it’s Daniel as a character rather than Davidson’s performance. Too often he feels less like a man with agency and more like a prize to be fought over. It’s sometimes hard to see why both Laura and Cherry would risk everything for him.
Still, these flaws are forgivable in a series so gloriously entertaining. By episode three, the twists have grown darker, the stakes higher, and the accidents more shocking (spoilers embargoed, but trust me: jaws will drop). And just when you think you’ve figured it out, the show pulls the rug from under you. Right up until the final shot you’ll be second-guessing who’s really in control.
The Girlfriend is streaming on Prime Video from September 10
