So, I recently got into No Good Nick because I was bored, I wanted fluff, and family shows are safe to watch with the kids around. Plus, I get a double nostalgia bomb with seeing Melissa Joan Hart (Sabrina the Teenage Witch) and Sean Astin (Rudy, The Goonies, a billion other things) playing husband and wife. Is it high art? No. But it's cute enough and fairly entertaining.
For the uninitiated, No Good Nick is about a girl named Nick who cons her way into the Thompson family's home by pretending to be a distant orphaned relative so that she can get revenge on them on behalf of her imprisoned father. For a lot of the show, you're kind of left to wonder how this family had anything to do with putting her father in jail and you get to know them, as does she, and like them, again as does she. All of this gets explained near the end of the second season and the Thompsons definitely don't come off as nice people.
But then, it gets more complicated and you start to think about it. Let me fill you in. Nick and her father own a restaurant, Franzelli's, which serves family style Italian food. They are doing well and are happy as can be. Liz Thompson is a chef, we've known this for a while but we soon learn that she opens her fancy Italian restaurant Crescendo across the street from Franzelli's. Suddenly, there's competition. So, you might think, oh Liz was more successful and the better place so that's not really her fault but just keep listening. At first, both still have customers but not enough. They keep competing with each other to "win". Franzelli's tries to compete by doing renovations and adding in a wood stove to cook their pizzas. Now, they're putting themselves in debt to compete but they were holding their own because they are established. Liz is struggling to keep her restaurant afloat. Her family gets scared that they might lose everything. Cue the family interfering with Franzelli's.
Molly Thompson, the daughter, has her and her friends write horrible reviews for the restaurant which drives people away (frankly the most egregious act the Thompsons commit against the Franzelli's). When their customers dry up, they decide to print out flyers to hand out to people to drum up more business so Jeremy Thompson, the son, steals the box of flyers to prevent them from advertising. With no new business and no more funds to make more flyers, the Franzelli's head to the bank only to be rejected by Ed Thompson which I find to be a grey area as all other banks denied their loan requests too. Liz started cooking some of their menu ideas and soon the Franzelli's resort to other means to get money, the mob. How stereotypical. This is unbeknownst to Nick but the good news doesn't last long as her father is quickly arrested and thrown in jail for bribery.
In order to get vengeance, once Nick learns of what the rest of the family did to her, she proceeds to systematically destroy them one by one. Exposing Molly's fakeness and ruining her instagram celebrity, exposing Jeremy not winning the student election and framing him for cheating, releasing rats into Liz's restaurants when a reality show was there with cameras. She starts coming around on what she's doing but it's too late and she inadvertently frames Ed for robbing his own bank. Everyone is guilty, everyone has done wrong, everyone has been hurt.
So, who's the bad guy? Is it Nick? She's just a kid and she was hurt pretty badly by the Thompsons but they also took her in and cared for her when they thought she was family and needed help. Ed even wanted to adopt her as his own daughter and she worked hard to try to set things right for them. Yet, she did cruelly destroy their lives for revenge and lie to them about being a distant relative in order to get close to them. But she was just doing the entire con out of love for her father who was put in jail because the Thompsons put him out of business.
Are the Thompsons the bad guys? They all acted pretty callously to put the Franzelli's out of business but did they deserve the extent of punishment they got? I mean, Liz's restaurant was ruined by bad press just like Franzelli's was, and Ed surely lost his job because of the whole robbing bank accusation thing. Sure Nick tried to put these things right but in reality, when things like this happens, it still takes a while to regain lost reputations as corrections spread a hell of a lot slower than sensational lies.
Is Nick's father the bad guy? I mean, kind of. He made a bad choice and ultimately that was what put him in jail but would he have made that choice had he not been pushed into desperation? And what pushed him to desperation? Money.
It always comes down to money. In this story, the Thompsons put the Franzelli's out of business for their own financial gain but let's not pretend that the Franzelli's weren't trying to do the same thing to the Thompsons as they wanted to win the restaurant war too. Both restaurants were struggling, both needed to make money. Both families ended up doing shady things in order to succeed. And what pushed them to make these awful choices and have them hurt other people? Capitalism. The need for money, the need to win at all costs.
Both families were playing in the system because they had to in order to stay alive. But in this system there always has to be a loser and someone always gets hurt. One person's riches and successes always comes at the cost of someone else's loss because that's how it works. Can you really blame either family for trying their hardest to win in such an unforgiving system? That's the true heartbreak of this show, that both families have suffered under this system and it pushed both families to act in ways that were completely against their usual morals in order to succeed.
In the end, did Crescendo beat out Franzelli's because it was the better product, like so many defenders of capitalism believe, or did they win because they were more ruthless? Because here's the thing, capitalism rewards profit more than morals, you're winning if you're making the most money and if you're not making money well, you lose.
If you're not fully convinced that capitalism is the true enemy in No Good Nick, that two Italian restaurants just can't coexist across the street from one another and one inevitably had to go out of business, then I'll just leave you with this one last point: Liz ends up acquiring the Franzelli building and planned to open up a second restaurant that would serve, family style Italian food. The same model as before but with one owner of the two restaurants and no real competition.
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| No Good Nick is like Six Degrees of Separation but for kids |
For the uninitiated, No Good Nick is about a girl named Nick who cons her way into the Thompson family's home by pretending to be a distant orphaned relative so that she can get revenge on them on behalf of her imprisoned father. For a lot of the show, you're kind of left to wonder how this family had anything to do with putting her father in jail and you get to know them, as does she, and like them, again as does she. All of this gets explained near the end of the second season and the Thompsons definitely don't come off as nice people.
But then, it gets more complicated and you start to think about it. Let me fill you in. Nick and her father own a restaurant, Franzelli's, which serves family style Italian food. They are doing well and are happy as can be. Liz Thompson is a chef, we've known this for a while but we soon learn that she opens her fancy Italian restaurant Crescendo across the street from Franzelli's. Suddenly, there's competition. So, you might think, oh Liz was more successful and the better place so that's not really her fault but just keep listening. At first, both still have customers but not enough. They keep competing with each other to "win". Franzelli's tries to compete by doing renovations and adding in a wood stove to cook their pizzas. Now, they're putting themselves in debt to compete but they were holding their own because they are established. Liz is struggling to keep her restaurant afloat. Her family gets scared that they might lose everything. Cue the family interfering with Franzelli's.
Molly Thompson, the daughter, has her and her friends write horrible reviews for the restaurant which drives people away (frankly the most egregious act the Thompsons commit against the Franzelli's). When their customers dry up, they decide to print out flyers to hand out to people to drum up more business so Jeremy Thompson, the son, steals the box of flyers to prevent them from advertising. With no new business and no more funds to make more flyers, the Franzelli's head to the bank only to be rejected by Ed Thompson which I find to be a grey area as all other banks denied their loan requests too. Liz started cooking some of their menu ideas and soon the Franzelli's resort to other means to get money, the mob. How stereotypical. This is unbeknownst to Nick but the good news doesn't last long as her father is quickly arrested and thrown in jail for bribery.
In order to get vengeance, once Nick learns of what the rest of the family did to her, she proceeds to systematically destroy them one by one. Exposing Molly's fakeness and ruining her instagram celebrity, exposing Jeremy not winning the student election and framing him for cheating, releasing rats into Liz's restaurants when a reality show was there with cameras. She starts coming around on what she's doing but it's too late and she inadvertently frames Ed for robbing his own bank. Everyone is guilty, everyone has done wrong, everyone has been hurt.
So, who's the bad guy? Is it Nick? She's just a kid and she was hurt pretty badly by the Thompsons but they also took her in and cared for her when they thought she was family and needed help. Ed even wanted to adopt her as his own daughter and she worked hard to try to set things right for them. Yet, she did cruelly destroy their lives for revenge and lie to them about being a distant relative in order to get close to them. But she was just doing the entire con out of love for her father who was put in jail because the Thompsons put him out of business.
Are the Thompsons the bad guys? They all acted pretty callously to put the Franzelli's out of business but did they deserve the extent of punishment they got? I mean, Liz's restaurant was ruined by bad press just like Franzelli's was, and Ed surely lost his job because of the whole robbing bank accusation thing. Sure Nick tried to put these things right but in reality, when things like this happens, it still takes a while to regain lost reputations as corrections spread a hell of a lot slower than sensational lies.
Is Nick's father the bad guy? I mean, kind of. He made a bad choice and ultimately that was what put him in jail but would he have made that choice had he not been pushed into desperation? And what pushed him to desperation? Money.
It always comes down to money. In this story, the Thompsons put the Franzelli's out of business for their own financial gain but let's not pretend that the Franzelli's weren't trying to do the same thing to the Thompsons as they wanted to win the restaurant war too. Both restaurants were struggling, both needed to make money. Both families ended up doing shady things in order to succeed. And what pushed them to make these awful choices and have them hurt other people? Capitalism. The need for money, the need to win at all costs.
Both families were playing in the system because they had to in order to stay alive. But in this system there always has to be a loser and someone always gets hurt. One person's riches and successes always comes at the cost of someone else's loss because that's how it works. Can you really blame either family for trying their hardest to win in such an unforgiving system? That's the true heartbreak of this show, that both families have suffered under this system and it pushed both families to act in ways that were completely against their usual morals in order to succeed.
In the end, did Crescendo beat out Franzelli's because it was the better product, like so many defenders of capitalism believe, or did they win because they were more ruthless? Because here's the thing, capitalism rewards profit more than morals, you're winning if you're making the most money and if you're not making money well, you lose.
If you're not fully convinced that capitalism is the true enemy in No Good Nick, that two Italian restaurants just can't coexist across the street from one another and one inevitably had to go out of business, then I'll just leave you with this one last point: Liz ends up acquiring the Franzelli building and planned to open up a second restaurant that would serve, family style Italian food. The same model as before but with one owner of the two restaurants and no real competition.
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| But hey, that's Capitalism From Lindsay Ellis' video: The Hobbit: The Desolation of Warners (3/2) |
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