Bad Girls

 I’ll start this post with a disclaimer: I love Bad Girls. It’s always entertaining, and at times- especially in Series 1-3- it’s absolutely brilliant. The Nikki/Helen romance is, I’d say, one of the best gay storylines ever to grace British TV.

But that’s not to say it’s perfect.

Ultimately, I would say, the show suffers from one big problem: it’s a serious drama that’s been squeezed into the format of a soap.

Nikki and Helen’s relationship is the best-written and best-developed plotline in the series. If I had to guess, I’d definitely say it was the one that Chadwick wanted to write. 

But that doesn’t sustain the weekly slot for very long.

The natural B-plot is Fenner’s relationship with Shell (and whichever other prisoners take his fancy), and the tension between Fenner and Helen, with Helen and Sean’s rapidly-deteriorating engagement in the background.

Now both those plotlines are quite well developed in the finished product- probably moreso than Helen/Nikki- but they’re surrounded by padding. The Julies, Shaz, Crystal- they all work as background characters, but much less as main ones (although it says something that the show can make you feel for each and every one of them- even the Julies, who start out as very 2-dimensional comic relief). The deserving main plots are given far too little screentime- I need more Nikki/Helen, and so does the show.

Another thing I’d criticise (although to a far lesser extent) is the constant changing of Helen’s position; is she wing governor? Is she No.1? Is she a strange quasi-staff member? She needs more consistency, or at least for her job changes to happen further apart.  

So, to summarise:

- Bring Helen and Nikki front and centre; make them one of the absolute focuses of the series- the other being Helen’s battles with Stubberfield/Hollamby/Fenner.

- Replace a majority of series-long B-plots with Jim Fenner/Shell and the conflicts arising therein; this is partially there already, but could be used and emphasised more effectively.

-Stop Helen’s job description changing all the time! This mostly arises from the whole show being stretched out to fulfill the weekly neo-soap format, but still.

-Remove the melodrama. Bad Girls is at its best when it’s (relatively) close to reality. Daring escapes in the back of a van to the Costa Del Sol don’t really fit.