A Time review says Prime Video’s six-episode thriller The Girlfriend unravels in Episode 4 when a major plot turn breaks the show’s own internal logic, leaving a gap the critic argues is large enough to derail the series’ momentum.
Adapted from Michelle Frances’s novel, The Girlfriend centers on Daniel Sanderson (Laurie Davidson), his girlfriend Cherry Laine (Olivia Cooke) and Daniel’s possessive mother, Laura (Robin Wright). The series toggles between Laura’s and Cherry’s perspectives as a wealthy London family comes to believe Cherry is an interloper, while Laura’s obsession with her son grows increasingly dangerous. The show, produced and partly directed by Wright, streams in full on Amazon.
Time highlights a sequence beginning at the end of Episode 3 that sets up the disputed turn. After a climbing accident leaves Daniel unconscious in a hospital, Laura tells Cherry—who has been shut out of the family’s orbit—that Daniel has died. In reality, Daniel has been taken off a ventilator and regains consciousness. According to the review, Laura’s lie and subsequent actions (including hiding Daniel at the family’s estate and intercepting his messages) are extreme but consistent with the show’s heightened, soapy logic. The series builds toward a confrontation in Episode 4 when Laura, returning to confess the deception, finds Cherry appearing disheveled and grieving and decides to double down on the falsehood by staging a funeral Cherry was not invited to.
The review’s chief objection centers on Cherry’s response. Time contends that Cherry—portrayed as obsessive, mistrustful and volatile—behaves in ways that defy common-sense verification and the character traits previously established. Rather than seeking confirmation through obituaries, contacting Daniel’s friends, or otherwise probing the high-profile death of a son of a prominent businessman and gallerist, Cherry accepts the false narrative, purchases a suit for a funeral she has not been told about, attends to public fallout and ultimately returns to her mother’s butcher shop. The critic writes that the omission of basic steps Cherry would likely take stretches the suspension of disbelief the genre requires.
The review does not fault the series for its theatricality. It notes that The Girlfriend knowingly traffics in the conventions of domestic thrillers—a glamorous intruder, a possessive matriarch, and escalating acts of deception and sabotage—and that viewers typically must accept heightened, improbable behavior to enjoy that brand of drama. The problem, according to Time, is not improbability per se but inconsistency: a response that contradicts the psychological profile the series has carefully built for one of its central characters.
Time singles out several moments that underscore how far the show is willing to push tone and detail, from early scenes that establish Oedipal tension between Laura and Daniel to flashes of Cherry’s extreme behavior, such as a surreal episode set in a butcher’s shop. The critic praises the lead performances—calling Wright’s and Cooke’s turns "scenery-chomping" in service of the genre—and says those portrayals are among the series’ chief pleasures and reasons viewers may still race to finish the six-episode run.
Nevertheless, the review argues that by Episode 4 the series violates the ‘‘fundamental facts’’ of its soapy alternate reality, creating a plot hole that undermines the basic game of guessing and second-guessing that drives domestic thrillers. That rupture, Time suggests, reduces the payoff of later twists because it severs causal logic: once characters act in ways unrelated to how they were established, subsequent surprises feel random rather than earned.
The Girlfriend’s creators and cast have leaned into exaggerated character work and visual flamboyance since the premiere. Robin Wright directed half the season and is credited as an executive producer; Olivia Cooke’s Cherry is styled as a striking contrast to the Sandersons’ wealthy world. The show’s six-episode shape and its adherence to the heightened register of the genre mean audience tolerance for improbability will remain a decisive factor in reception.
Time’s review concludes that while the series remains watchable—largely on the strength of its leads—it loses some of its dramatic traction when Episode 4 allows a logic-breaking moment to pass unchecked. For viewers who prize tightly coherent plotting even within melodrama, the critic warns, that lapse may undercut the enjoyment of what otherwise delivers several of the satisfactions typical of a glossy, suspense-driven binge.
