As soon as I saw that Good Trouble was led by The Foster’s veterans Callie (Maia Mitchell) and Mariana (Cierra Ramirez), I knew they would have a hit on their hands. Good Trouble finished their first season on a high note taking in 360 thousand viewers in their finale episode and a confirmed second season. As a former fan of The Foster’s, I was excited to see where our favorite sisters would end up and what their departure would be from the high school aged character I was used to seeing.
(Image courtesy of goodtroubledaily, Tumblr)
The show starts off with Callie and Mariana road tripping to Los Angeles to start their respective careers after graduating from college. The first episode kicked off with us finding out the Adams-Fosters sisters are living in an “intentional community” called The Coterie where residents from all different backgrounds share bathrooms and kitchens, unknown to Callie. To top it all off, the entirety of the girls’ belongings were stolen out of a UHaul the night before they started their first days on the job.
Mariana struggles with being a Latina woman in a male-dominated tech company and working in an environment where everyone seems to have ulterior motives. The men on her team are jerks, to say the least (they assigned her to work on an “assets” file which was just a folder filled with gifs of boobs) and her boss seems to be interested in her for all the wrong reasons. She eventually realizes there is a pay gap between the female and male engineers, and an even bigger pay gap between the white female engineers and those of color.
Callie, with her new short and serious haircut, is serving as a law clerk, for a conservative judge during a highly televised and controversial shooting of a young black boy by the police. As if the competitiveness of her job and attempting to figure out if her judge is ruling fairly in the shooting case wasn’t enough, she’s also stuck in not one but two love triangles: a bisexual artist and Coterie roommate Gayle (Tommy Martinez) and sexy lawyer Jamie (Beau Mirchoff), as well as Gayle and his hot boyfriend Bryan (Michael Galante).
(Image courtesy of good trouble, Tumblr)
While focusing on our two favorite sisters as the main characters, we find important characters in the supporting cast. There’s Malika, Black Lives Matter activist and one of the leaders in helping find justice for the black boy who was shot by police. Obviously, this becomes a problem considering Callie and Malika literally live two doors down from one another. Among the rest of the cast, we find a closeted gay manager of the Coterie, Alice, body positive and plus sized influencer Davia, and Dennis, a former corporate man who quit his job and divorced after his son died of cancer.
The best part about Good Trouble is that it’s not trying too hard to be something it’s not. Some teen dramas work too hard to mimic what they think young people in this age sound like (I’m looking at you Riverdale) and forget to make good television that shows issues we actually care about. Let’s face it, we are women who care about hot shirtless guys and social justice. It’s about time television caught up with us. Good Trouble perfectly reflects the world we live in and the people we encounter every day.
There isn’t always a happy ending at the end of every episode because that is how life works. We have to admit, even our favorite dramas of our early teenage days (Pretty Little Liars, Teen Wolf, Gossip Girl, and etc.) lacked anything close to a diverse cast and any, if not all, of their problems weren’t relatable. I loved watching Chuck and Blair run all over the Upper East Side as much as anyone, but let’s be honest, there was no scenario where I would be shopping for a dress for the 18th gala or event I had to go to that week.
Good Trouble mirrors Freeform’s The Bold Type in realness that’s refreshing and kept me watching every week until the end. My recommendation? Grab some chips, curl up on the couch with your bestie and get ready to laugh, cry, and cringe at everything that is Good Trouble.
(Image courtesy of Popsugar)