TV review: The Good Mothers is an edge-of-seat-thriller with no tidy endings

This is drop-dead great television with high stakes for everyone. Italy is regal and seedy in the same shot and the acting is so good you could almost do without the subtitles

Based on true events, The Good Mothers tells the story of Denise, daughter of Lea Garofalo, Maria Concetta Cacciola and Giuseppina Pesce - three women who dared to defy the ‘Ndrangheta mafia they were born into.

Italian drama has an unfair mafia advantage. Gomorrah and My Brilliant Friend would have been top 100 shows in the past 20 years without the mafia angle. Add it in, and they’re in the top 10.

So The Good Mothers (Disney+) always had a shot. This six-part drama is a story about women and the 'Ndrangheta — a violent organisation from Calabria (the region in the 'toe' of Italy) dating back to the 16th century.

It’s about the women who got out: Lea Garafolo and her daughter Denise, along with Giuseppina Pesce and Maria Concetta Cacciola. It’s also about Anna Colace, the prosecutor who leans on them to testify against their own families. And the best bit — it’s tightly based on the truth.

It starts in 2009 with Lea and Denise going to visit Denise’s father in Milan, Carlo Cosco. This seems like a terrible idea — Lea had taken Denise into the witness protection programme after revealing details of Carlo’s family’s activities to the police. Now she was out and going to meet him on the promise that she would be forgiven. I won’t spoil the story by telling you what happens next.

I don’t want to spoil anything about The Good Mothers, because it is drop-dead great television. The stakes are high for everyone, Italy is regal and seedy in the same shot, the acting is so good you could almost do without the subtitles.

Gaia Girace, who plays Denise, is on the verge of international super-stardom. She is as good here as she was in My Brilliant Friend. Valentine Belle is compelling as Giuseppina Pesce, Francesco Colella is terrifying as Carlo Cosco, brimming with menace and cunning.

But the story is the real star in The Good Mothers.

We think we know how a Witness Protection Scheme works — you disappear one day and never see your family again. But here, the three women who agree to act as witnesses for the state, stay in touch with their family back in Calabria. This is despite the fact that they are abused and little better than objects to the men, their relations, who run the crime families in Calabria.

The reason they stay in touch is because of their kids. So for one reason or another, all three women decide to leave state protection and head back to the fold.

The result is an edge-of-seat-thriller with no tidy endings, because this is the real world, and Italian dramas aren’t big on tidy endings anyway.

I can’t remember the last time I was rooting so much for a group of characters. There is a tendency in American mafia dramas to show it from the gangster’s side, to glamorise it a bit, even in The Sopranos. Here we see the Mafia as a dark left-over from history, where men are doomed to act like their fathers and women suffer the consequences in a suffocating home life. Having just finished the final episode of The Good Mothers, I can’t get it out of my mind.