The Antiheroines Next Door

ATLANTA — Christina Hendricks wanted to be clear. “I’m not saying go rob a grocery store to get your power back,” she said.

Hendricks spoke while hurrying to a table read for an episode of her new series, “Good Girls,” a comedy-drama about three women with an unusual approach to self-determination. In a suburb of Detroit, Hendricks’ Beth, Retta’s Ruby and Mae Whitman’s Annie are three mothers overwhelmed with financial worries and domestic crises. But a few minutes into the series, which debuts Monday on NBC, they’re donning ski masks and holding up a Fine & Frugal. That felony triggers others, and soon each woman has to keep the lid on a life of crime while cutting chicken patties into star shapes and getting the children to school.

On a soundstage here, where the show films its interiors, you can wander through the women’s houses, appreciating the ordinariness of the rooms — the collectible pottery, the bulk-bought animal crackers, the moisturizer on the night table — and the outrageousness of the situation. In the scene they filmed this early February morning, Annie, a cashier in the middle of a custody battle, and Ruby, a former waitress with a gravely ill daughter, were huddled over a laptop, drinking coffee out of matching mugs while they searched homicide reports and debated best-case and worst-case scenarios. Glass half-full? The latest crisis subsides, the women keep earning.

“What’s glass half-empty?” Annie asks.

“Getting put in a wood chipper,” Ruby replies. This may not be a joke.

But “Good Girls” is a comedy, most of the time. Like “Weeds” or “Nurse Jackie,” other shows whose leads walked the line between heroine and anti, it’s an adrenalized mix of genres — a lot of laughs, thrills and consequences. Series with similarly combustible tones are typically found on cable or streaming services, not on a broadcast network. But that sensibility grabbed Jennifer Salke, the president of NBC, who was recently tapped to head Amazon Studios.

“We love the show because it’s distinctive, it has you on the edge of your seat,” Salke said, speaking by telephone. “We would never dream in a million years of trying to do anything to push it to the middle.”

That’s wise. Because “Good Girls” suggests that when pushed too far, women push back.

Jenna Bans, the show’s creator, is a longtime writer and producer on several Shonda Rhimes shows and has also created “The Family,” a domestic potboiler, and “Off the Map,” a sultry medical drama. Despite “awesome feminist parents,” she has spent most of her life as a self-proclaimed good girl, learning early on “not to ruffle feathers, not to rock the boat, to do what was expected of you,” she said. (Bans was speaking by telephone from Los Angeles, where she was busy doing what was expected of her, finalizing the script for the season finale.)

The impetus for this series came a month or so before the 2016 election, when an “Access Hollywood” tape surfaced, recording Donald Trump’s lewd remarks about women. Surprised by the overt sexism on display, she called her mother, figuring her reaction would be the same. But as Bans described it, her mother, “a salty, hilarious, practical woman from the Midwest,” just said, “Where have you been?”

That conversation made Bans want to honor women like her mother, who have kept going when the playing field was anything but level. Eventually, that tribute became a compensatory fantasy, showing what might happen if women did rock the boat, if they did ruffle feathers, if they did take what they want. When we meet the characters of “Good Girls,” they’re struggling, they’re powerless, they haven’t reaped the rewards they’ve been promised. A few ski masks, a handful of toy guns, an “All right, everybody be cool and nobody gets hurt” and those rewards start coming.

“It’s probably not the best choice,” Bans said. “It’s not a responsible choice.” It’s certainly a bold choice to shove a climactic event like the heist into the pilot, rather than build up to it over many weeks, but Bans seemed unconcerned that viewers won’t stick around. “We’re never really struggling for lack of a story,” she said. “Usually we’re trying to prune story out of our episodes because they’re too overstuffed.”

“Good Girls” has a punchier, more comedic feel than the Shondaverse of “Scandal,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Private Practice” (series on which Bans worked), but shares some of those shows’ DNA. As Bans said, Rhimes imbued in her “a sense of risk-taking, of not keeping it safe, of pushing your characters to do things that scare them.”

Here, doing things that scare them allows these suburban moms to finally own their smarts, skills and mettle. As Hendricks’ Beth says in the pilot, “We have accomplished way harder than this. I once made 300 damn cupcakes in one night and they were both nut- and gluten-free.” So what’s a little crime?

The crimes on “Good Girls” might not stay little, but they will rarely push the women too far off their moral centers. Last fall, Mike Hale in The New York Times noted that if television seems finally to have entered the age of the antiheroine, showrunners seem reluctant to create a heroine “who freely practices evil and is, at least in dramatic terms, celebrated for it.”

It’s a reluctance “Good Girls” won’t apologize for. “We really want to protect their sense of right and wrong,” Bans said. “When they make what is a morally gray choice, they really struggle with it.”

Truly amoral women, like Claire Underwood of “House of Cards” or Cersei Lannister of “Game of Thrones,” probably don’t get invited out for 2-for-1 margarita night, but as for the women of “Good Girls,” “I really feel like they’re my friends,” Bans said. She wants viewers to feel the same way.

So these women won’t break bad. But they will definitely break not nice. And if they were on cable, Bans thinks they would probably swear a lot more, but she promises that this is the only compromise. Hendricks said she hopes that the show will encourage viewers to examine their own sense of right and wrong. “Following these women around, you ask yourself questions like: ‘What would you do for your family? What’s the sliding scale in your life? Would you do something a little illegal? Would you do something a lot illegal?'” Beth will commit multiple felonies, but will still slide a coaster underneath a soda can, so that’s her line in the sand.

If the show is asking its audience to rethink its own choices, it’s also encouraging its lead actresses to make some new ones. Whitman, usually cast as wised-up teenagers on “Parenthood” and “Arrested Development,” is playing a deeply unwise adult. Retta, a comedian best known as Donna Meagle, the assured office manager and coiner of the phrase ‘Treat yo self” on “Parks and Recreation,” has a dramatic role. Hendricks, the office femme fatale of “Mad Men,” is a neglected mother of four.

(Kathleen Rose Perkins of “Episodes” played Hendricks’ character in an earlier pilot, but as the story changed, the role was recast. As Hendricks, who had her own role on Cameron Crowe’s “Roadies” recast, said, “Happens to everyone.”)

None of these characters are flawless. None of these characters are simple. As Retta, drinking a La Croix in her trailer between scenes, joked, “I get to have it all — kids and a husband and an illegal job.” Whitman, resting in the neighboring trailer, described “a weird sick excitement on my part to play somebody who isn’t perfect.”

“Good Girls” asks what would happen, what could happen if girls and women stopped angling for perfection. “It’s sad and funny to think about,” Bans said. If Hillary Clinton had held up a couple of grocery stores, she added, “our lives could all be so different right now.”