The following contains spoilers for the Prime miniseries The Girlfriend.
There’s a special kind of arrogance inherent in calling someone a “gold-digger.” It implies the accuser thinks they, themselves, are naturally entitled to whatever wealth they have, but other people are not. In recent years, we’ve seen a small spate of narratives that center an upper-class paranoia, a fear of infiltration by a scheming, ruthless lower-class person. Think of Saltburn, Parasite, The Menu — all movies where the working class have their revenge against their rich “benefactors.”
The Girlfriend, a Prime miniseries that dropped in September, is a shlocky “psychological” thriller that asks the audience to suspend disbelief when it comes to its nonstop drama. This show also has Too Much to say about class. And far too much to say directly to me.
Laura, played by Robin Wright, is the wealthy owner of three art galleries and wife of a wealthy real estate mogul. Most of all, her life revolves around her adult son, Daniel. The entirety of the online discourse about emotionally incestuous “boy moms” comes to mind and is readily utilized in the show’s script and visuals, beginning with a limb-tangled swimming scene in the first episode where mother and son wrestle in a pool. Right after mother and son disentangle and retire to the in-house sauna, however, Daniel mentions his new girlfriend, and Laura begins a slow-burn freakout. Each new reveal about her son’s girlfriend stokes Laura’s fears that “the girlfriend” isn’t who she says she is — that she is a liar, a social climber, a fake.
Olivia Cooke plays Cherry, “the girlfriend.” She’s a young real estate agent who has clawed her way into her current job with a combination of grit and faking-it-til-you-make-it. She buys and returns designer dresses; she lies about her high school, her father’s job, and other class markers; and she “steals” a listing from her nepo-baby colleague at her real estate firm. But she’s also charming and funny.
When we first enter Cherry’s POV, we learn her nepo-baby colleague, who’s at work hungover that day, received a promotion over Cherry, simply because of her mother’s influence. In this opening, we witness Cherry reading the writing on the wall: Success depends on where you come from and who you know, and not really on how hard you work, as long as you can look like you’re working hard. As Cherry says to her mother: “I work with these people every day. All they have to do is breathe, and everything comes to them.”
Laura sinks deeper into her paranoia, frothing at the mouth with every small lie she catches Cherry in. But as we flip back and forth between points of view, we see that in many of the early interactions between Cherry and Laura, Laura is not engaging with Cherry in good faith. She’s trying to trip her up.
Cherry has to explain herself and battle for any scrap of sympathy she gets. When her ex-boyfriend confronts her outside of her work, he accuses her of following him to a gallery when she had just been accompanying her new boyfriend to his mother’s opening. We are never shown this previous relationship in action; we only have Cherry’s allegations of abuse and the ex’s story about her being “crazy,” a refrain I know we’ve all heard before.
Routinely, Daniel fails to believe or understand why Cherry is hurt by his mothers actions. It’s as if everyone in the show who’s wealthier sees Cherry as something stuck to their shoe, and they don’t understand why she would want even a smidgeon of the comfort they take for granted. Cherry might lie early on, but Laura doesn’t hesitate the second she has an excuse to tell Cherry to back off her son. When Cherry tries to move past it and asks her to try and be happy for her and Daniel, Laura threatens her: “Your lies will catch up with you eventually, Cherry. I’m going to make sure of it.” Cherry’s literally never mean to Daniel that we see. In fact, he adores her.
Elena Nicolau, senior entertainment editor at Today, interviewed Michelle Frances, author of the novel from which the show is adapted. When asked about the core themes of her work, Frances responded: “It’s the wealth divide. That gulf between the very, very rich and those who are struggling just to keep afloat, and how unfair all that is…It bothers me more and more and more as we go on. It’s just heading so far in one direction It’s actually quite terrifying.” Frances recalls her own early years, where, according to Nicolau, “Like Cherry, she was unable to attend university because of high fees. She watched as other classmates, who hadn’t done as well in school, moved forward.”
It feels important somehow that we’re introduced to Laura’s polyamory first, at the same time as we first see her husband, the first time we see her at work actually in her gallery (as opposed to yelling at her assistant over the phone). In 2024, a controversial article published in The Atlantic, declared polyamory “the ruling class’s latest fad.” Laura’s husband, we later learn, longs to close the relationship — but with this arrangement, Laura gains all the social and financial benefits of her marriage without having to actually act as a partner to her husband. Instead, she can focus on Daniel, her son-turned-surrogate-partner.
Laura has only one real problem in her life: Her first pregnancy ended tragically and they lost the baby, who she would have named Rose. She clings to it, leans on it to curtail her husband and son from ever deviating from prioritizing her desires. The rest of her problems — her exasperation with her employee, selling the work of artists she represents, any number of small inconveniences — are just part of her Truman-show-esque life simulation. When Laura threatens Cherry, stalks her, attempts to sabotage her relationship, plunges Cherry into grief with an unconscionable lie, attempts to ruin Cherry’s career, evicts her from her home, and finally chokes her — all these things have real, rock-hard consequences for Cherry. To Laura though, Cherry doesn’t feel like a person so much as a nightmare she just wants to wake up from so she can go back to brunching with her son. It’s reminiscent of nonprofit board members asking me if things with workers whom I was organizing with had “calmed down” yet. The expectation from our ruling class is always that the working class will stop trying to pop the bubble and will go back down to where they “belong.” It’s genuinely perplexing to them when someone they perceive as beneath them won’t simply tolerate abuse.
Too many of these plot points echo a story from long, long ago in my life. When I first went to go meet the parents of the person I was dating, I was overwhelmed by their McMansion-level wealth. It’s nothing compared to the kind of wealth and power shown on The Girlfriend, but they had more money than anyone I’d ever known.
Before dinner that night, my partner’s mother, already drunk on white wine, pulled me into their formal dining room, and told me about the son she’d lost. She dismissed how her husband and surviving child had “moved on.” Throughout my time knowing her, she would descend into a self-centered grief. She owned every conversation, turning them back on her, her accomplishments, her work — or her child’s accomplishments and accolades. I could mention having done anything, and she would respond with something related, but then turned the conversation back to her accomplishments. She was a nonprofit CEO, and I was a lowly nonprofit manager at a different organization. At first, things didn’t seem so bad, but they went off the rails when we returned to the east coast.
For a brief moment, Laura tries to fit Cherry into her life. After Cherry pretends to drown, allowing Laura, a strong and avid swimmer, to “save” her, the two hit it off for what must be less than a day. During that time, Laura drinks wine with Cherry, admonishes Daniel for being rude to his “guest,” and takes her shopping, Laura spraying her perfume onto Cherry several times without asking, both violating her consent, and seeming to intend to remind her son of herself. But Cherry’s not a doll that Laura can just dress up, and when Laura learns that Cherry got revenge on an ex-boyfriend whom Cherry claims abused and controlled her but who is from somewhere much closer to Laura’s class bracket, Laura turns on Cherry once again.
This is TV, and it is unhinged that Cherry seems to have put…a bloody heart with the ability to squirt blood, somehow effortlessly into a wedding cake. However, anyone who’s escaped an abusive romantic relationship can relate to the moments of rage, the desire for that person to understand — or at least experience — some of the hurt the victim endured. Laura discovers that Cherry, whether accidentally or on purpose, pushed her father, paralyzing him. She ignores that, according to Cherry’s mother, the man was abusive. According to the way Laura escalates every time Cherry retaliates against her for Laura’s very real harms, Laura must believe Cherry is supposed to just quietly take abuse, to offer no resistance or reaction, and to disappear.
There were quick snippets, too when my ex-mother-in-law would attempt to cram me into her life, square-peg-in-round-hole-style. These, too, often revolved around shopping. She’d reacted to her chance to have a daughter of her own by sawing off her long hair, forcing that daughter back into the closet. And while I went through various gender feelings that would surface and recede for years to come, my mother-in-law would do things like drunkenly smash a “princess hat” onto my head when she’d bought a bunch of silly hats for a party, while repeating, over and over, like an incantation that I was a princess. If I was the partner for her son she would have chosen, I’d be feminine and heterosexual and cis and, most of all, I would adore and obey my mother-in-law. But anyone who knows me knows that I am no princess, and at the time, it felt to me like it was her attempt to smash her preferred identity onto me.
Over time, my ex mother-in-law enabled her kid in abusing me. She coached me, again and again, to just make peace with her kid, to be the peacemaker, to push my sense of justice down. She participated in triangulating me, welcoming her kid back with open arms whenever he went to her to complain about me, to lay the groundwork for villainizing me further in the future.
When we lived in California and she wanted him back home, she lied to me about a job she said she’d lined up for me. She waited until I’d submitted my notice to my amazing art job in San Francisco to tell me the job had gone to someone else. In that moment, I knew it had never been real and that my career and life and even emotional stability were not anything she took seriously.
All this made Laura’s bisexuality in the series stand out to me. There’s a third “girlfriend” in The Girlfriend, and she’s Laura’s ex, Lilith, who nearly came between Laura and her husband. We meet Lilith when Laura goes to her, needing someone else to get on her side about Cherry. Lilith offers all the validation Laura’s craving. “You seem very straight,” Cherry says to Laura when Laura tells Cherry that she can tell she’s surprised by the revelation. There is something about that, right? There’s something to the fact that the idea of Laura ever flying a rainbow flag is nearly unthinkable. She’s built an exterior image that situates her at the top of the social strata, and reading as queer isn’t included in that calculation.
Later, Lilith lets Laura exhibit her paintings when an artist pulls out. Laura also cheats on her husband, their marriage closed at that point, with Lilith. When Cherry vandalizes Lilith’s paintings overnight, Laura exclaims it’s the perfect evidence for her to use to finally get Cherry, to which Lilith, aghast, tells Laura she has “no empathy” — and it’s true. When it comes to Cherry, to her husband, to Lilith, even Daniel, Laura can’t bring herself to truly see them as people, as anything more than things to use or destroy if necessary to get what she wants. This selfishness brings Laura’s bisexuality too close to being a metaphor for indulgence. I found myself squinting and checking what year it was (especially given there are zero other queer characters on the show, besides Lilith who is mostly a plot device).
When Laura’s husband decides to leave her because of her infidelity, he reveals Laura’s “career” as a successful gallerist is a sham. He’s been paying for everything the whole time, calling in favors with friends to sell unsellable art. Laura’s been living in a wealth-fueled delusion. In 2025, this reveal feels eerily relevant, with fewer UK residents in the creative fields than ever before coming from working class backgrounds. And it’s not just in the UK: America’s richest 1% can buy the entire residential housing market should they so choose. Wealth disparity has never looked like it does today.
Laura guards her son like she does her status and wields her money and influence to punish Cherry for taking Daniel away from her. After my ex mother-in-law threw my career off the rails, I wound up taking a low, underpaid assistant position at her organization where I saw just how her days were really spent. An unofficial job duty became driving her to work on the days she was too hungover to function in the morning. She could barely use a computer. She left every website by closing out the whole browser and then relaunching it. But she loved the image of her role and her status, and when we would visit for dinner, she would opine while drunk about “the pressure” she felt that warranted her high salary. If at some point she’d worked hard to get where she was, she certainly was no longer doing so by the time she sabotaged my career and had no sense of what hard work actually felt like. She played a game of putting on her business attire, of showing up to the office, of complaining about “incompetent” employees, much like Laura does in the show. For all the show’s melodrama, that part hit a realistic note.
To some, the ending of the show is a reveal, one that finally paints Cherry as the “real” villain. To me, it’s still ambiguous. It does not seem true that Cherry wanted Laura to die. What we know is that she wanted Daniel to perceive Laura as attacking her. But also, Laura had attacked her; Daniel just didn’t see it. Cherry’s deception each time involved making the attack visible to others, as opposed to one with plausible deniability. Throughout the show, each of Cherry’s devious actions is a response to a harm, and she really only retaliates against serious and intentional harms. She never takes any revenge on the nepo-baby who “stole” her promotion, for example. A friend of Danielle’s who misjudges Cherry when she did not have the full story draws none of Cherry’s ire and even apologizes, which Cherry accepts while putting the incident behind her. When people treat Cherry normally, she responds with grace. There is no reason given in the show to think that Cherry would have been anything but gracious to Laura if she had not felt she was under attack first.
I think there’s a jealousy that Laura has for Cherry, too, complicated by a psychosexual element. Is Laura possibly attracted to Cherry in addition to being jealous? Does she see elements of herself in Cherry? Does Cherry’s presence discomfort Laura because it forces her to face the fact she’s a “lady of leisure” (as Cherry asks before meeting her), despite the image of the hard-working boss she’s put on?
I could see my ex mother-in-law’s jealousy of me fully on display on my wedding day. She wore white. It was not an off-white or a beige but a crisp white dress with a suit jacket embroidered with sequins. No one — not even my partner — stopped her. I mean, in fact, at the time, if I said anything about my mother-in-law’s treatment, my ex would yell at me, telling me I might be his partner but I would never be family like his mother. It feels like something out of a melodramatic TV show, her inability to de-center herself. Later that night, she got too drunk as usual and pissed herself in her white wedding clothes, a long, now off-white, puddle descending down the back of her ankle-length skirt.
In the show’s final scene, a flash forward to a year in the future, Daniel finds a video Laura recorded before her death. In it, she accuses Cherry of being someone who won’t stop until she’s got what she wants, someone who will turn on anyone who gets in her way — but the exact same thing can be said of Laura.
Maybe the real horror at the end is that Daniel, after believing he had found someone “different,” had wound up marrying his mother after all.
Wow jeez thank you for sharing about terrible mess partners and their controlling parents. Glad you are out of that situation.