Spinoffs i Wish I'd Watched Their Parent: We Got Trouble!

There are so many good series out there that often by the time I consider watching them, they’re gone. So wanting to see a spin-off of that same series can often seem like something that bears its own risks. However, I’ve always felt that if they can stand on their own merits, it doesn’t matter.

Back when Freeform was ABC Family, one of its bigger success stories was The Fosters, a charming series about two lesbians in San Francisco (played by Teri Polo and Sherri Saum) who adopted a group of children of various genders and races to live in their home. Dealing with family and all of the issues and bigotries that come around, it was one of Freeform’s biggest successes. But due to all the issues of timing, I never got around to watching it. So to then decide to see Good Trouble, a series that not only builds from that world but instead makes it more complicated would seem to be suicidal risk. And yet having watched five episodes, I can’t help but be charmed, amused, and entertained by this marvelous world that the creators of this world are building.

Callie and Mariana Adams Foster (Maia Mitchell and Cierra Ramirez) have graduated from college have both graduated from college and moved to a community-style living place in LA known as the Coterie. Callie is now clerking for a conservative judge (Broadway star Roger Bart) and Mariana has started working as an engineer at Silicon Valley. It’s inevitable that both would struggle at their jobs, but its for specific reasons. Callie is, extremely liberal, and may have received her internship solely for political reasons. Mariana is working bottom rung where the engineers generally don’t even try to hide how sexist and racist they are, and we learned in a recent episode, that basically she was hired as window dressing. Both are torn between their desires to stick out and their urge to get ahead in the workplace, and its taken a toll on both of them. Mariana has basically run up a $20,000 credit card debt and Callie has started having a lot of casual sex, mostly with an artist named Gael, who has made it very clear he’s bi, and can’t decide whether he wants to be serious with her, or have trysts with his boyfriend in the hotel swimming pool.

Many of the other residents of the Coterie have issues that are even more complex. Alice, the manager is a lesbian who is still in love with her best friend, who is so clueless about it that she just asked her to be her maid of honor. Rebecca is a teacher whose having a friends-with-benefits relationship with someone from Wisconsin – who happens to be married, and she doesn’t seem to have a problem with it. So far, the most intriguing character is Malika, an African-American activist who is very involved with a police shooting case that Callie’s judge is presiding over. There are all kinds of ethical issues that Callie doesn’t want to disclose, partly because she thinks she can make a difference, and partly because she doesn’t want to lose her edge at work. There are going to be problems, though, because one of her colleagues just found out where she lives and who lives there.

This is a brilliantly engaging and witty series that tends to look at things from more angles than the average young adult series. And it’s not afraid to pull characters from its mother series over. Last night’s episodes featured the Moms visiting their daughters for the first time, getting worried about where they lived, getting stoned on cannabis cookies, and one of the most hysterical improve sessions ever. If you didn’t know The Fosters, like I didn’t, you’d still have found it entertaining.

If there’s a flaw with Good Trouble, it has to be with how the creators frame things. For some reason, they have decided to frame their series with flashbacks and cutaways to either sex scenes or things that we didn’t know about. You need to pay attention, and even if you do, you can feel like you’re in the middle of an episode of Lost.

This is a minor quibble, though. I have no doubt that a lot of the people who would’ve had objections to a series like The Fosters will have the same objections to Good Trouble. The series itself made it very clear in a flashback involving one of the mom’s who was running for public office. But the fact is, we need series like Good Trouble not for social justice reasons, but for pure entertainment reasons. Freeform is rapidly becoming one of the better sources for entertainment on TV, and I only wish I’d discovered some of its series sooner.

My score: 4.25 stars.