Why Beth Boland From Good Girls Looks So Familiar

The next season of Good Girls, the NBC crime drama, is set for release on March 7, 2021. It's been almost an entire year since last we caught up with the housewives turned money launderers of Michigan and fans are anxious to see where Good Girls' fourth season goes next.

The titular girls have come a long way from that first robbery gone awry, and arguably no one has come further than lead Beth Boland, played by Christina Hendricks. Beth began the series as a homemaker doing her best while her husband Dean (Matthew Lillard) screws around behind her back. But as she and her friends increasingly find themselves pulled into the world of crime, no one has excelled at it quite like Beth. She's the one who can manipulate their boss Rio (Manny Montana) and she's the one who can become a boss herself.

And a not-small part of what makes Beth such a great character is the woman who plays her: Christina Hendricks. And as we wait for Good Girls season 4 to begin, you might find yourself reaching backwards to watch (or rewatch) other things Hendricks has been in. Chances are you've probably seen Christina Hendricks before — here's where.

Working backwards, Christina Hendricks' other most recent role is the Amazon Prime series Tin Star, another crime show, albeit from a very different angle. Unlike Good Girls' focus on housewives getting pulled in too deep, Hendricks' character Elizabeth Bradshaw is much more in control of her morally ambiguous choices.

Tin Star is focused on Jack Worth (Tim Roth), an ex-undercover police officer from the UK who's moved to the small town of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada to escape a dark past, continue his alcohol recovery, and start fresh. Obviously things do not go to plan for Worth or his family.

A big part of the story involves Worth getting so black-out drunk that it creates an alter-ego named Jack Devlin wo exists to do the dirty work Worth can't. And for such an extreme Jekyll-and-Hyde story like this to work, there must also be an adequate villain — and those villains come from Fort McMurray's corrupt North Stream Oil company. And who works for that oil company? Elizabeth Bradshaw, played by Christina Hendricks.

Elizabeth Bradshaw and Beth Boland may both do bad things, but Bradshaw does it with a lot more impunity. Bradshaw doesn't feel trapped in a world of crime, she chooses to work for North Stream Oil and tells herself she can do some good from within the belly of the beast. However, Bradshaw will do nearly anything to get what she wants, and that makes her cunning and dangerous. And if you think Boland and Bradshaw are the only villains Hendricks has played, think again.

A lot of people's first encounters with Christina Hendricks is from her role as the eternally sneaky con artist villain Saffron on Joss Whedon's single season sci-fi series Firefly.

Audiences first meet Hendricks in the episode "Our Mrs. Reynolds," where she tricks Captain Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) into marrying her while he's drunk. She infiltrates his ship, the Serenity, and proceeds to wear down Mal's defenses until she's able to drug him. Her actual goal isn't to be married to anyone so much as it is to steal Serenity and hand it over to pirates for her own bounty. At the time she goes by the name Saffron, but that's not the only time the crew of Firefly encounters her.

Mal meets up with Saffron again in the episode "Trash," but this time she's going by a new name — Bridget — because she's married to a friend of his. She and Mal wind up on a heist together, and in the process they run afoul of a third former husband who thinks the con-woman's name is Yolanda. In the end, while Mal and Saffron/Bridget/Yolanda secure the Lassiter pistol they set out to steal, Mal is betrayed again left naked in a the desert.

Hendricks' performance on Firefly is a fan favorite and, had the show persisted beyond a single season, she most certainly would've have appeared again. Who knows? If that new Firefly series ever gets off the ground, Hendricks may even reprise the role again.

But, of course, if there's only one thing other than Good Girls you know Christina Hendricks from it's almost certainly the AMC juggernaut series Mad Men, where she played Joan P. Holloway. Joan starts the series a the office manager of the advertising agency Sterling Cooper, but she doesn't stay there.

Over the course of five seasons, Hendricks explores many sides of what it means to be a working woman in the 1960s. She's a leader among women, often helping the others in the office, including Peggy Olsen (Elisabeth Moss), when it comes to reproductive health issues. Joan is overwhelmingly competent, but she struggles both with having her skills diminished because she's a woman and also because of her desire to start a family.

In a show full of romantic affairs, one of the most famous on Mad Men is the one between Joan Holloway and senior partner Roger Sterling (John Slattery). The two have a long-running relationship before Joan winds up married to the hapless Dr. Greg Harris (Gerald Downey and Sam Page).

By the end of Mad Men, Joan finds her way to the top of the heap as a full partner at the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce agency. It's because of Joan's complexity and ability to rise above adversity that she remains one of the most beloved characters on Mad Men to this day.