By Jae-Ha Kim
Amazon.com
October 9, 2007
The second season of Girlfriends offers more drama than the sitcom served up during its debut year. But it also offers plenty of laughs, though they are sometimes bittersweet.
Joan (Tracee Ellis Ross, daughter of Diana Ross), a sensible attorney who’s unlucky in love, is back, along with her assistant Maya (Golden Brooks), her cheerful roommate Lynn (Persia White), and their often thoughtless boy crazy pal Toni (Jill Marie Jones). Executive produced by Kelsey Grammer (Cheers, Frasier), the show stars four charismatic actresses portraying funny, ambitious, and flawed women.
None of them are perfect, but none of them are delusional enough to think they are. Not even Toni.
All 22 episodes are included on this 3-disc set, which aired during the 2001-2002 television season. As with many real-life friends, the women butt heads about the men in their lives.
The end of the first season showed Toni cheating on her fiancé and Joan accidentally blurting out the news. The start of the second season shows how Toni deals with the betrayal: by making a play for Joan’s sex-addict boyfriend.
That Joan is as gorgeous as she is brilliant isn’t lost on the viewer, who may wonder how any man could possibly cheat on her. But we’re not quite sure what Joan is going to do about it. Will she kick her boyfriend to the curb? Will she forgive Toni? And who will their friends side with: Team Joan or Team Toni?
Things kick into gear for Joan (and the viewer) when she starts seeing a therapist (the hilarious Fred Willard), who helps her realize that she has to let Toni go–at least for now–in order to move on with her own life. Maya ends up dealing with some drama herself, when she begins an emotional affair with a man, who turns on her by befriending her husband–and threatening to tell him all about their “affair.”
Though there’s no shortage of dramatic moments, Girlfriends is first and foremost and smartly written comedy that gets to the heart of women’s often complicated friendships with each other in a dramatic, funny, and often touching way.
