‘The Good Mothers’ Takes the Female Perspective to Tell an Inside Story of a Mafia Takedown
The Hollywood Reporter
11th January 2024
It all started about a year ago. The Good Mothers, the Anglo-Italian series based on the eponymous book by journalist Alex Perry, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, winning the inaugural, and thanks to budget cuts one and only, prize for best new series at the festival’s TV sidebar, the Berlinale Series.
Roughly twelve months later, the show, produced by House Productions and Fremantle-owned Wildside, which is currently airing on Hulu, and on Disney+ outside the U.S., is in the running for this year’s Critics Choice Awards in the Best Foreign Language TV Series category. The Good Mothers will go up against South Korean series Bargain, The Glory, Mask Girl and Moving, the German period drama The Interpreter of Silence, and the hit French crime series Lupin.
Based on true events, The Good Mothers was adapted for television by Stephen Butchard (Baghdad Central) and directed by Julian Jarrold (The Crown) and Elisa Amoruso (Time Is Up). It tells the story of Denise Cosco (Gaia Girace from HBO’s My Brilliant Friend), her mother Lea Garofalo (Micaela Ramazzotti), Maria Concetta Cacciola (Simona Distefano) and Giuseppina Pesce (Valentina Bellè), four women born into the powerful, and deadly, Italian Calabrian crime family the ‘ndrangheta who decide to fight the mafia from within. They cooperate with the law, represented by magistrate Anna Colace (Barbara Chichiarell), whose idea was to attack the criminal organization by leveraging the women inside it.
The Good Mothers is no ordinary mafia story, which is what makes the show stand out, both narratively and culturally.