Filthy Rich
Dec. 9th, 2020 10:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rsadelleHere's the basic premise of Filthy Rich: Eugene and Margaret Monreaux are the white, extremely wealthy power couple heading up the Sunshine Network, an evangelical Christian TV network. They have two adult children: Eric and Rose. Eric is married to Becky, who is pregnant and whose brother Paul, aka The Reverend, is one of the stars of the network. Rose wants to be a fashion designer; Eric truly believes in the company and its missionary work. Eugene's plane crashes, and his will provides for three additional adult children outside his marriage: Ginger, Jason, and Antonio. Ginger runs a successful porn site based in Las Vegas. Jason is a pot grower and dealer in Colorado. Antonio is an MMA fighter in New York and a single father with a very young son.
Despite some fun juicy bits, the show starts out relatively slowly. At the beginning, the most interesting thing, and the central conflict that I kept thinking the show should revolve around, is the clash between Ginger and Margaret. They are both smart, strong-willed women who know how to keep an audience. There's more to it than that: Ginger grew up knowing that Eugene was her father and watching Margaret's show. At one point, she says to Margaret that she watched her show every day: "I learned how to cook from you, how to read scripture!"
The other thing that is a coming conflict is that Eugene isn't dead. Or is he? It's hard to tell in the first few episodes if he's supposed to be alive or if what he's going through is an afterlife journey. He eventually interacts with people we know are in the real world, but he also has these odd interactions with people you start to realize are dead.
Then the show makes a shift and introduces The 18:20, so named for Matthew 18:20: "Where two or three have gathered in my name, there am I with them." The 18:20 is a coalition of powerful men, three of whom are major investors in the Sunshine Network: Governor Love, Townes, and Don Bouchard. I admit I was not particularly interested in this element of the story, even though it is the main vehicle driving much of the plot. Tina tells Ginger that The 18:20 paid her to seduce Eugene to use it as blackmail and that's why their henchman Hagamond Sheen has been hanging out to intimidate them. One of the camgirls - Ginger has moved her entire operation from Las Vegas into a hotel in New Orleans - recognizes one of The 18:20 and Ginger tells the women to start recording their clients. They get Governor Love on tape. Margaret finds out about it and uses the existence of the tape to blackmail him. While she does know at this point what they did to Tina, her primary motivation is that The 18:20 is trying to pull Eric in and she wants him away from them. Then Hagamond kidnaps Ginger trying to get to the actual tape.
This is where the thing that made me start really caring about the show happens: Becky comes to the hotel looking for Eric, who has been talking to and is now starting a relationship with Rachel, one of the women who works for Ginger. (The best throwaway detail in the show is Rachel's grandma in Arizona who rescues goats.) Becky bangs on Ginger's door, demanding to know where Eric is. Ginger starts to cry, which takes Becky off guard, and she comes in and bandages Ginger's wrists. They're sitting on Ginger's bed talking, and Becky leans forward and puts her hand on Ginger's cheek. Then she snatches her hand away and says she should leave.
Ginger and Tina take their stories to the media and the story gets reported that Margaret Monreaux is implicated in violence against women. Eric and Rose go to the hotel, where Ginger and a group of people including Rachel, Atononio, and Antonio's mom Yopi are hanging out in the hotel bar, which the women living at the hotel use as a communal space for socializing. Eric hugs Ginger, and then so does Rose, and they ask what they can do for her. She says they've already done it; she's never had people show up for her like this before. Then Margaret arrives and says she didn't know anything about it. Ginger agrees to go on Margaret's show and tell everyone that - for six million dollars for each of the five of the siblings, equal to the 1% originally stipulated in Eugene's will.
Becky talks to her brother about her doubts about her marriage and bringing a child into a loveless marriage. He tells her she has to surrender to God's will. Then Ginger is practicing the delivery of her statement in the bathroom when Becky comes out of one of the stalls. They talk for a moment, and then Becky walks up to Ginger, says, "I surrender," and kisses her. This is where they 100% became my OTP of the show. If you want to see all of this, I've reblogged gifsets of all their pivotal moments in my tag for the show on Tumblr.
With part of her money, Ginger invests in a woman-run startup: Rose's clothing company. They have a fashion show to launch it in the courtyard of the hotel with the camgirls as models and The Reverend's show projected onto the backdrop of the catwalk. The morning of the show, Ginger and Becky have a conversation in the kitchen of "the camp" (the Monreauxs' rich people country estate) where Ginger says life should be about freedom, not surrender. "There are no rules," she says, and Becky answers, "Only consequences."
Ginger invites Becky along to the fashion show because she thinks a day with the girls would be good for her. There's a hilarious bit where Rose, behind Becky, mouths, "Why did you do that?" at Ginger. Becky has a conversation on the balcony of the hotel with Rachel, where she confirms that Rachel is the one having an affair with Eric. This is a really great scene, both for the way the women relate to each other and for what it shows us about Becky. Rachel tells Becky that she didn't think of her as a real person. Becky says that she's not used to thinking about herself as a person either. Then she says, "I know we're supposed to have a big cat fight right now or something, but my feet are swollen, so I can't really kick," and she tells Rachel, "My husband doesn't see me. But if I'm being honest, I kind of like it that way, so." Ginger, coming up the stairs, paused to listen to their conversation. At this point, she continues up and says, "Maybe there is a way for everyone to see you, Becky." She puts Becky in the wedding dress that's the last look of the show, and Becky does an amazing job.
In the bar after the show, Becky says, "I don't want to go home." Ginger says, "Let's get you out of this dress," and takes her out of the room by the hand. They go to Ginger's room, where Becky says, "Set me free. Please." Ginger starts to undress her, kisses her neck and down her back, and that's where we leave them in that episode. We pick up in the next episode with them in a house with a real estate agent who tells them, "And it's in an excellent and open-minded school district." Becky says, "I'm not a lesbian," and Ginger explains the house is for her and her mom, not her and Becky. The real estate agent leaves them alone, and Ginger says, "It's not completely crazy, though, to think this could be ours. If you weren't eleven months pregnant and married to my brother," at which point Becky tells her, "Eric and I had to get married."
Becky goes to Eric and tells him she wants a divorce. Her brother comes into Eric's office and says a very angry no to this plan, and in the conversation Becky admits that she had an affair too. Becky and Ginger run into each other in the bathroom again, where Ginger says, "I liked playing house with you today," and that she wants to explore the possibilities of their relationship. Becky tells her she left Eric. Ginger gives her a key to her hotel room. Sadly no one giffed the best part of this, which is the last line: Ginger says, "I'll bunk with Rachel until my house is ready," and Becky says, "Yeah, unless Eric's bunking with her."
Now we need to take a step back to the boring parts about men that are driving so much of the plot: Eugene via an intermediary gave Eric a list of names. Eric dug into it and found they were the names of hurricanes and that the company profited off of them and the housing their mission built to supposedly help people are basically just slums that allowed them to get diaster relief money. Eric takes this to Paul, who scornfully tells him that where some people see disaster, others see profit. Paul is also very, very close to the members of The 18:20. We also learn that Townes, another member of The 18:20, was violent toward his wife Veronica, who we know by this point is Jason's biological mother. Margaret leaks his violence to the media, and Townes's murder by Hagamond is instead presumed to be a suicide.
Meanwhile, Yopi has made a deal with Don Bouchard, the third Sunshine Network investor from The 18:20, to give Antonio a shot at an MMA fight. But then she explains to Antonio that the plan is that he loses the first fight, wins the second, and fights fair in the third, and everyone gets rich. We see that Yopi has Rachel and the rest of the camgirls set up to place the entire six million dollars in bets on the fight, and when Antonio can't bring himself to throw the fight, there's a sinking feeling that his mother and her gambling problem is about to bankrupt them again. But at the end of the fight when he wins, she tells him she bet everything on him and quadrupled their money.
Also on fight night, Margaret figures out that Rose is pregnant. She assumes the father is Rose's ex-fiance, who is there as the emcee, and confronts him. He then tells the actual father: Jason, who is not really Jason but rather Jason's adopted brother Mark who impersonated Jason because Jason was dying and they needed the money. Rose and Ginger have meetings the next day in New York related to the fashion business, and Ginger says, "There are things in New York that you can't get in Louisiana. At least not easily." Margaret tells Rose that if she gets an abortion, "The Lord and I may not forgive you." Later, during the fight, Rose tells Ginger that she's going to be a good mother at the right time and now isn't the right time. In the end, Margaret gets on the plane and goes with them to New York.
Hagamond, having been dismissed by The 18:20 but nonetheless being a true believer, has decided that Becky in the fashion show is the pregnant woman in white from Revelations and that Anotonio's son Jesus is the savior. While the fight is going on, he assaults Becky and kidnaps Jesus while Rachel, who was babysitting, was in a different room of the hotel with Eric.
We pick up in the next episode a day and a half later. Becky has given birth. Ginger comes to see her in the hospital, and they have a really sad, bleak conversation, that ends with Becky saying, "I feel sad for you, Ginger. I always have," and Ginger saying, "Back at you, girl." This is a pretty sharp turn from what we saw before. I'm guessing that since this is episode nine of ten, the writers couldn't spend as much time on some of the intervening details and just shortcutted a lot of them.
Hagamond kills Reverend Paul, the family gets Jesus back, Hagamond dies, and Eugene goes to Tina and Ginger's. These details aren't super important for my purposes, but suffice to say that there is a lot of interconnecting and coincidence going on here.
Now let's take another step back. One of the things I wasn't super into in the second half of the season was that they started showing us flashbacks to the night that was the beginning of Margaret and Eugene's relationship. This dribbles out slowly, but the story is this: as teenagers, Margaret and Franklin were in love. Franklin is Black and he's now the Monreauxs' right hand man/fixer. Margaret and Franklin's mothers both worked for Eugene's family. The family was hosting a debutante ball. Margaret's mother sends her up the stairs to Eugene's room with a drink for him while he's still getting ready. Eugene leans in to kiss her, and then Franklin interrupts them. Margaret and Franklin have a plan to meet together at their place on the grounds later that night. Eugene's mother lets Margaret wear her old debutante gown and join the party as a guest, where Margaret dances with Eugene. Margaret's mother tells Eugene's mother that as Eugene is getting old to be unmarried (he's 22 or 23), he'll need a wife who will adore him. Margaret never goes to meet Franklin, and instead Eugene and his friends go out and beat Franklin up. The three mothers are in the kitchen when Franklin comes in. Franklin's mother is angry, and Eugene's mother points out that there's no way the law will punish Eugene, but if they keep it quiet, she will make sure Franklin never has to work in the Monreaux house again. Margaret's mother strongly encourages her to take the deal.
One of the other threads tying everything together is that journalist Luke, a Black man who knows Franklin, has been investigating the Monreauxs. He has a whole crime wall dedicated to them at home. He's murdered on the night of the fight, and while everyone assumes Hagamond did it, there's some doubt. Eric comes to Margaret and confesses that he pushed Luke, took down all the evidence from the crime wall, and left Luke to die. He dumps out the crime wall contents onto Margaret's couch. Margaret tells him his place is with his wife and child and she will take care of things. Franklin comes to see her after she's looked through the evidence. She shows him the bank statements that show that Eugene's pilot, who Luke has discovered was dying of cancer, was paid large sums of money by the company the day before the plane crash. Franklin tells Margaret about Eugene and his friends beating him up, says that everything he's ever done was in her best interest, and asks why she didn't make him CEO after Eugene's death since no one knows more about the business than he does. She tells him he doesn't have the key qualification: he isn't blood. This takes place after she told him they are everything to each other, they slept together, and then she didn't come sit with him at the fight. He then says, "Trust me, I knows I's the help," and then, when she tells him to get out, "Yes'm," both in a voice and diction that aren't the way he usually speaks but rather evoking a very specific racial dynamic. I was deeply surprised by this. I didn't expect this rich Christian people show on Fox to actually name any of the racism of the Monreaux family and their empire. I wouldn't say they do much in the way of dealing with it rather than just showing it to us - in addition to Franklin, there's Norah, who is the Black woman running the TV show element of the network, and I thought Antonio didn't get as much character development as the other children - but they do explicitly name it at least once.
Rose tells Mark that the worst part of having an abortion was not having him there, and they decide to get married. Eric at this point is clearly falling apart, and he goes to the police to give a confession about Luke. The woman who takes his confession tells him she'll be right back, and when she leaves the room, Luke enters. Luke, it turns out, is FBI and on the trail of The 18:20. He asks Eric to wear a wire. Eric refuses to inform on his family. Rose is getting married at the house at the camp, which Ginger finally points out is, no matter what they call it, a plantation. During the rehearsal as Rose comes down the stairs, Margaret reminisces about coming down the stairs for her debutante ball and marrying Eugene a few months later. Ginger looks sharply at her and asks how old Eugene was. Margaret mostly waves off the age difference by saying, "It was a different time."
Ginger goes to check in on Becky, who is napping, and tells her that she has a houseguest who will be leaving soon (meaning Eugene) and after that Becky can come stay with her if she wants. She's bending down to kiss her forehead when Eric sees them. Meanwhile, Yopi has brought Rachel, who Antonio is now interested in, as her guest to the wedding. This leads to a hilarious (at least to me) bit where Ginger says, "I'm so sorry, Eric," and Eric says, "My wife is sleeping with my sister and my brother is hitting on my girlfriend. I think I'm the sorry one." He also says to her at one point, "We are our father's children."
Amidst all this family drama, Franklin and Eugene arrive. Eugene tells Margaret that he has been on a journey and he has given up material things. She points out he's wearing white tie and tails, which he says is out of respect for the bride. Eugene says that he's made amends to his sons, but he's failed his girls. To that end, he is giving Ginger what she really wants: his ownership stake in the company. Then he tells Margaret that God saved him so he can do right by all six of his children. Margaret and Ginger both ask, "Six?" Then Becky comes down the stairs with the baby and says, "Eugene? You came back for us." As it dawns on Ginger and Margaret what this means about Eugene and Becky's relationship, Margaret says, more to herself than to anyone else, "I was just a child." The staging of all of this is fantastic, with the framing of the staircase and entryway that have been so central to this episode and the flashbacks. The aftermath of this is that Eugene and Becky leave together with their daughter (which actually doesn't make a huge amount of sense as he says the rest of the family can have the company but he's keeping the house as a strong foundation of a life for his child), Franklin sets the house on fire as Margaret stands and watches him, and Eric agrees to wear the wire. The last shot is of Margaret, flanked by Eric and Rose on one side and Ginger and Antonio on the other, watching the house burn.
Structurally, there's a problem with the Becky and Eugene reveal. There are no hints about that before that moment, which makes it seem completely out of the blue and like a twist for the sake of being a twist. Thematically, however, it recasts the whole show in a new light. Remember the part way up there where I said I wasn't interested in the plot about The 18:20? This ending brings it home that whatever we might have thought was going on in this show, it is largely about harm men have done to women, and even more specifically about Margaret's reckoning with the truth of her relationship with Eugene. I cared most about the women's relationships with each other, and I do think that's an important element of the show. It's the part that resonated with me and that I wanted to see more of. But even the context for those relationships come out of men treating women badly: Eugene preys on Margaret, with both of their mothers' encouragement and approval and then cheats on Margaret; Eugene doesn't support his other children's mothers; The 18:20 caused direct harm to Eugene's children's mothers with his knowledge; Reverend Paul steamrolls over Becky's feelings; Eric cheats on Becky. In retrospect, I find the Becky and Eugene reveal super interesting in what it reveals about the story the people making the show were ultimately telling, which is, again, not a story I expected to find in a Fox show.
When I originally mentioned watching the first few eps of the show on Twitter, I said it was watchable, but had a lot of wasted potential. Particularly at the beginning, with what the show looked like it was going to be, I wanted it to lean into the ridiculous over-the-topness, the way GCB did with acting more like the way Madeleine Stowe just full-on committed on Revenge. When I tweeted about it again after having written fic, I said it still wasn't worth watching, and that while I was unemployed and waiting for Yuletide assignments before watching another Star Trek, I wouldn't waste limited TV time on it. And now I'm not sure if I would recommend it. Knowing that it's about the reckoning with Eugene's past bad behavior, even beyond cheating on Margaret and abandoning children he knew about that we get from the very beginning, the tone makes more sense. A story about Margaret reckoning with the truth of who her husband was and what their relationship was built on doesn't lend itself as easily to melodramatic high camp as the struggle over the family fortune and business soap opera the show looks like at the beginning. And yet I'm pretty sure it's still not a very good show. I'm completely obsessed with it because, as that Tumblr post says, my brain just decided that's what I was going to be obsessed with. But I don't know that I would recommend it to anyone else. I will tell you, though, here at the end of it, I'm really sorry it got cancelled. I would have loved to see what they did with the possibilities in a second season where Ginger and Margaret are both on the company board, Eric is informing for the FBI, and Becky is living with Eugene.
Despite some fun juicy bits, the show starts out relatively slowly. At the beginning, the most interesting thing, and the central conflict that I kept thinking the show should revolve around, is the clash between Ginger and Margaret. They are both smart, strong-willed women who know how to keep an audience. There's more to it than that: Ginger grew up knowing that Eugene was her father and watching Margaret's show. At one point, she says to Margaret that she watched her show every day: "I learned how to cook from you, how to read scripture!"
The other thing that is a coming conflict is that Eugene isn't dead. Or is he? It's hard to tell in the first few episodes if he's supposed to be alive or if what he's going through is an afterlife journey. He eventually interacts with people we know are in the real world, but he also has these odd interactions with people you start to realize are dead.
Then the show makes a shift and introduces The 18:20, so named for Matthew 18:20: "Where two or three have gathered in my name, there am I with them." The 18:20 is a coalition of powerful men, three of whom are major investors in the Sunshine Network: Governor Love, Townes, and Don Bouchard. I admit I was not particularly interested in this element of the story, even though it is the main vehicle driving much of the plot. Tina tells Ginger that The 18:20 paid her to seduce Eugene to use it as blackmail and that's why their henchman Hagamond Sheen has been hanging out to intimidate them. One of the camgirls - Ginger has moved her entire operation from Las Vegas into a hotel in New Orleans - recognizes one of The 18:20 and Ginger tells the women to start recording their clients. They get Governor Love on tape. Margaret finds out about it and uses the existence of the tape to blackmail him. While she does know at this point what they did to Tina, her primary motivation is that The 18:20 is trying to pull Eric in and she wants him away from them. Then Hagamond kidnaps Ginger trying to get to the actual tape.
This is where the thing that made me start really caring about the show happens: Becky comes to the hotel looking for Eric, who has been talking to and is now starting a relationship with Rachel, one of the women who works for Ginger. (The best throwaway detail in the show is Rachel's grandma in Arizona who rescues goats.) Becky bangs on Ginger's door, demanding to know where Eric is. Ginger starts to cry, which takes Becky off guard, and she comes in and bandages Ginger's wrists. They're sitting on Ginger's bed talking, and Becky leans forward and puts her hand on Ginger's cheek. Then she snatches her hand away and says she should leave.
Ginger and Tina take their stories to the media and the story gets reported that Margaret Monreaux is implicated in violence against women. Eric and Rose go to the hotel, where Ginger and a group of people including Rachel, Atononio, and Antonio's mom Yopi are hanging out in the hotel bar, which the women living at the hotel use as a communal space for socializing. Eric hugs Ginger, and then so does Rose, and they ask what they can do for her. She says they've already done it; she's never had people show up for her like this before. Then Margaret arrives and says she didn't know anything about it. Ginger agrees to go on Margaret's show and tell everyone that - for six million dollars for each of the five of the siblings, equal to the 1% originally stipulated in Eugene's will.
Becky talks to her brother about her doubts about her marriage and bringing a child into a loveless marriage. He tells her she has to surrender to God's will. Then Ginger is practicing the delivery of her statement in the bathroom when Becky comes out of one of the stalls. They talk for a moment, and then Becky walks up to Ginger, says, "I surrender," and kisses her. This is where they 100% became my OTP of the show. If you want to see all of this, I've reblogged gifsets of all their pivotal moments in my tag for the show on Tumblr.
With part of her money, Ginger invests in a woman-run startup: Rose's clothing company. They have a fashion show to launch it in the courtyard of the hotel with the camgirls as models and The Reverend's show projected onto the backdrop of the catwalk. The morning of the show, Ginger and Becky have a conversation in the kitchen of "the camp" (the Monreauxs' rich people country estate) where Ginger says life should be about freedom, not surrender. "There are no rules," she says, and Becky answers, "Only consequences."
Ginger invites Becky along to the fashion show because she thinks a day with the girls would be good for her. There's a hilarious bit where Rose, behind Becky, mouths, "Why did you do that?" at Ginger. Becky has a conversation on the balcony of the hotel with Rachel, where she confirms that Rachel is the one having an affair with Eric. This is a really great scene, both for the way the women relate to each other and for what it shows us about Becky. Rachel tells Becky that she didn't think of her as a real person. Becky says that she's not used to thinking about herself as a person either. Then she says, "I know we're supposed to have a big cat fight right now or something, but my feet are swollen, so I can't really kick," and she tells Rachel, "My husband doesn't see me. But if I'm being honest, I kind of like it that way, so." Ginger, coming up the stairs, paused to listen to their conversation. At this point, she continues up and says, "Maybe there is a way for everyone to see you, Becky." She puts Becky in the wedding dress that's the last look of the show, and Becky does an amazing job.
In the bar after the show, Becky says, "I don't want to go home." Ginger says, "Let's get you out of this dress," and takes her out of the room by the hand. They go to Ginger's room, where Becky says, "Set me free. Please." Ginger starts to undress her, kisses her neck and down her back, and that's where we leave them in that episode. We pick up in the next episode with them in a house with a real estate agent who tells them, "And it's in an excellent and open-minded school district." Becky says, "I'm not a lesbian," and Ginger explains the house is for her and her mom, not her and Becky. The real estate agent leaves them alone, and Ginger says, "It's not completely crazy, though, to think this could be ours. If you weren't eleven months pregnant and married to my brother," at which point Becky tells her, "Eric and I had to get married."
Becky goes to Eric and tells him she wants a divorce. Her brother comes into Eric's office and says a very angry no to this plan, and in the conversation Becky admits that she had an affair too. Becky and Ginger run into each other in the bathroom again, where Ginger says, "I liked playing house with you today," and that she wants to explore the possibilities of their relationship. Becky tells her she left Eric. Ginger gives her a key to her hotel room. Sadly no one giffed the best part of this, which is the last line: Ginger says, "I'll bunk with Rachel until my house is ready," and Becky says, "Yeah, unless Eric's bunking with her."
Now we need to take a step back to the boring parts about men that are driving so much of the plot: Eugene via an intermediary gave Eric a list of names. Eric dug into it and found they were the names of hurricanes and that the company profited off of them and the housing their mission built to supposedly help people are basically just slums that allowed them to get diaster relief money. Eric takes this to Paul, who scornfully tells him that where some people see disaster, others see profit. Paul is also very, very close to the members of The 18:20. We also learn that Townes, another member of The 18:20, was violent toward his wife Veronica, who we know by this point is Jason's biological mother. Margaret leaks his violence to the media, and Townes's murder by Hagamond is instead presumed to be a suicide.
Meanwhile, Yopi has made a deal with Don Bouchard, the third Sunshine Network investor from The 18:20, to give Antonio a shot at an MMA fight. But then she explains to Antonio that the plan is that he loses the first fight, wins the second, and fights fair in the third, and everyone gets rich. We see that Yopi has Rachel and the rest of the camgirls set up to place the entire six million dollars in bets on the fight, and when Antonio can't bring himself to throw the fight, there's a sinking feeling that his mother and her gambling problem is about to bankrupt them again. But at the end of the fight when he wins, she tells him she bet everything on him and quadrupled their money.
Also on fight night, Margaret figures out that Rose is pregnant. She assumes the father is Rose's ex-fiance, who is there as the emcee, and confronts him. He then tells the actual father: Jason, who is not really Jason but rather Jason's adopted brother Mark who impersonated Jason because Jason was dying and they needed the money. Rose and Ginger have meetings the next day in New York related to the fashion business, and Ginger says, "There are things in New York that you can't get in Louisiana. At least not easily." Margaret tells Rose that if she gets an abortion, "The Lord and I may not forgive you." Later, during the fight, Rose tells Ginger that she's going to be a good mother at the right time and now isn't the right time. In the end, Margaret gets on the plane and goes with them to New York.
Hagamond, having been dismissed by The 18:20 but nonetheless being a true believer, has decided that Becky in the fashion show is the pregnant woman in white from Revelations and that Anotonio's son Jesus is the savior. While the fight is going on, he assaults Becky and kidnaps Jesus while Rachel, who was babysitting, was in a different room of the hotel with Eric.
We pick up in the next episode a day and a half later. Becky has given birth. Ginger comes to see her in the hospital, and they have a really sad, bleak conversation, that ends with Becky saying, "I feel sad for you, Ginger. I always have," and Ginger saying, "Back at you, girl." This is a pretty sharp turn from what we saw before. I'm guessing that since this is episode nine of ten, the writers couldn't spend as much time on some of the intervening details and just shortcutted a lot of them.
Hagamond kills Reverend Paul, the family gets Jesus back, Hagamond dies, and Eugene goes to Tina and Ginger's. These details aren't super important for my purposes, but suffice to say that there is a lot of interconnecting and coincidence going on here.
Now let's take another step back. One of the things I wasn't super into in the second half of the season was that they started showing us flashbacks to the night that was the beginning of Margaret and Eugene's relationship. This dribbles out slowly, but the story is this: as teenagers, Margaret and Franklin were in love. Franklin is Black and he's now the Monreauxs' right hand man/fixer. Margaret and Franklin's mothers both worked for Eugene's family. The family was hosting a debutante ball. Margaret's mother sends her up the stairs to Eugene's room with a drink for him while he's still getting ready. Eugene leans in to kiss her, and then Franklin interrupts them. Margaret and Franklin have a plan to meet together at their place on the grounds later that night. Eugene's mother lets Margaret wear her old debutante gown and join the party as a guest, where Margaret dances with Eugene. Margaret's mother tells Eugene's mother that as Eugene is getting old to be unmarried (he's 22 or 23), he'll need a wife who will adore him. Margaret never goes to meet Franklin, and instead Eugene and his friends go out and beat Franklin up. The three mothers are in the kitchen when Franklin comes in. Franklin's mother is angry, and Eugene's mother points out that there's no way the law will punish Eugene, but if they keep it quiet, she will make sure Franklin never has to work in the Monreaux house again. Margaret's mother strongly encourages her to take the deal.
One of the other threads tying everything together is that journalist Luke, a Black man who knows Franklin, has been investigating the Monreauxs. He has a whole crime wall dedicated to them at home. He's murdered on the night of the fight, and while everyone assumes Hagamond did it, there's some doubt. Eric comes to Margaret and confesses that he pushed Luke, took down all the evidence from the crime wall, and left Luke to die. He dumps out the crime wall contents onto Margaret's couch. Margaret tells him his place is with his wife and child and she will take care of things. Franklin comes to see her after she's looked through the evidence. She shows him the bank statements that show that Eugene's pilot, who Luke has discovered was dying of cancer, was paid large sums of money by the company the day before the plane crash. Franklin tells Margaret about Eugene and his friends beating him up, says that everything he's ever done was in her best interest, and asks why she didn't make him CEO after Eugene's death since no one knows more about the business than he does. She tells him he doesn't have the key qualification: he isn't blood. This takes place after she told him they are everything to each other, they slept together, and then she didn't come sit with him at the fight. He then says, "Trust me, I knows I's the help," and then, when she tells him to get out, "Yes'm," both in a voice and diction that aren't the way he usually speaks but rather evoking a very specific racial dynamic. I was deeply surprised by this. I didn't expect this rich Christian people show on Fox to actually name any of the racism of the Monreaux family and their empire. I wouldn't say they do much in the way of dealing with it rather than just showing it to us - in addition to Franklin, there's Norah, who is the Black woman running the TV show element of the network, and I thought Antonio didn't get as much character development as the other children - but they do explicitly name it at least once.
Rose tells Mark that the worst part of having an abortion was not having him there, and they decide to get married. Eric at this point is clearly falling apart, and he goes to the police to give a confession about Luke. The woman who takes his confession tells him she'll be right back, and when she leaves the room, Luke enters. Luke, it turns out, is FBI and on the trail of The 18:20. He asks Eric to wear a wire. Eric refuses to inform on his family. Rose is getting married at the house at the camp, which Ginger finally points out is, no matter what they call it, a plantation. During the rehearsal as Rose comes down the stairs, Margaret reminisces about coming down the stairs for her debutante ball and marrying Eugene a few months later. Ginger looks sharply at her and asks how old Eugene was. Margaret mostly waves off the age difference by saying, "It was a different time."
Ginger goes to check in on Becky, who is napping, and tells her that she has a houseguest who will be leaving soon (meaning Eugene) and after that Becky can come stay with her if she wants. She's bending down to kiss her forehead when Eric sees them. Meanwhile, Yopi has brought Rachel, who Antonio is now interested in, as her guest to the wedding. This leads to a hilarious (at least to me) bit where Ginger says, "I'm so sorry, Eric," and Eric says, "My wife is sleeping with my sister and my brother is hitting on my girlfriend. I think I'm the sorry one." He also says to her at one point, "We are our father's children."
Amidst all this family drama, Franklin and Eugene arrive. Eugene tells Margaret that he has been on a journey and he has given up material things. She points out he's wearing white tie and tails, which he says is out of respect for the bride. Eugene says that he's made amends to his sons, but he's failed his girls. To that end, he is giving Ginger what she really wants: his ownership stake in the company. Then he tells Margaret that God saved him so he can do right by all six of his children. Margaret and Ginger both ask, "Six?" Then Becky comes down the stairs with the baby and says, "Eugene? You came back for us." As it dawns on Ginger and Margaret what this means about Eugene and Becky's relationship, Margaret says, more to herself than to anyone else, "I was just a child." The staging of all of this is fantastic, with the framing of the staircase and entryway that have been so central to this episode and the flashbacks. The aftermath of this is that Eugene and Becky leave together with their daughter (which actually doesn't make a huge amount of sense as he says the rest of the family can have the company but he's keeping the house as a strong foundation of a life for his child), Franklin sets the house on fire as Margaret stands and watches him, and Eric agrees to wear the wire. The last shot is of Margaret, flanked by Eric and Rose on one side and Ginger and Antonio on the other, watching the house burn.
Structurally, there's a problem with the Becky and Eugene reveal. There are no hints about that before that moment, which makes it seem completely out of the blue and like a twist for the sake of being a twist. Thematically, however, it recasts the whole show in a new light. Remember the part way up there where I said I wasn't interested in the plot about The 18:20? This ending brings it home that whatever we might have thought was going on in this show, it is largely about harm men have done to women, and even more specifically about Margaret's reckoning with the truth of her relationship with Eugene. I cared most about the women's relationships with each other, and I do think that's an important element of the show. It's the part that resonated with me and that I wanted to see more of. But even the context for those relationships come out of men treating women badly: Eugene preys on Margaret, with both of their mothers' encouragement and approval and then cheats on Margaret; Eugene doesn't support his other children's mothers; The 18:20 caused direct harm to Eugene's children's mothers with his knowledge; Reverend Paul steamrolls over Becky's feelings; Eric cheats on Becky. In retrospect, I find the Becky and Eugene reveal super interesting in what it reveals about the story the people making the show were ultimately telling, which is, again, not a story I expected to find in a Fox show.
When I originally mentioned watching the first few eps of the show on Twitter, I said it was watchable, but had a lot of wasted potential. Particularly at the beginning, with what the show looked like it was going to be, I wanted it to lean into the ridiculous over-the-topness, the way GCB did with acting more like the way Madeleine Stowe just full-on committed on Revenge. When I tweeted about it again after having written fic, I said it still wasn't worth watching, and that while I was unemployed and waiting for Yuletide assignments before watching another Star Trek, I wouldn't waste limited TV time on it. And now I'm not sure if I would recommend it. Knowing that it's about the reckoning with Eugene's past bad behavior, even beyond cheating on Margaret and abandoning children he knew about that we get from the very beginning, the tone makes more sense. A story about Margaret reckoning with the truth of who her husband was and what their relationship was built on doesn't lend itself as easily to melodramatic high camp as the struggle over the family fortune and business soap opera the show looks like at the beginning. And yet I'm pretty sure it's still not a very good show. I'm completely obsessed with it because, as that Tumblr post says, my brain just decided that's what I was going to be obsessed with. But I don't know that I would recommend it to anyone else. I will tell you, though, here at the end of it, I'm really sorry it got cancelled. I would have loved to see what they did with the possibilities in a second season where Ginger and Margaret are both on the company board, Eric is informing for the FBI, and Becky is living with Eugene.