Even though Zeus Network's Baddies is a spiritual successor to the original Bad Girls Club franchise and is produced by Natalie Nunn, a social media star who got her start as a cast member on Bad Girls Club, the series is lacking some of what made Bad Girls Club special.
There's no denying that Baddies has become a streaming phenomenon with franchises set in a variety of locations, including an upcoming Baddies Africa that takes the series international, but that hasn't stopped fans of the original Bad Girls Club series from tormenting streaming service executives about giving them somewhere to watch the show eight years after it stopped airing.
So, what is it about Baddies that just doesn't live up to the legacy that Bad Girls Club left behind?
The cast comes with a built-in hierarchy and it changes the show
Without Natalie Nunn, there would be no Baddies and there's no denying that it would be impossible to separate her from the show. But unfortunately, the fact that she's so tightly entertwined with the creation and production of Baddies while also being part of the show has changed the energy of the show.
While Bad Girls Club had all the women on equal footing when they were cast, Natalie Nunn is the built-in leader of Baddies by the show's very nature and it means that she's virtually untouchable as far as the cast drama goes and it brings in a power imbalance to the cast.
Instead of having a group of women who are brought together to have viewers watch as their personalities clash or mesh into fights and friendships, everyone knows that every season will feature Natalie Nunn on top of the pyramid and everyone else falling under her.
As a former BGC cast member, Natalie Nunn knows what made the original series work and fans can't deny that the work she's done in the entertainment world, coming from the show to running a series of her own is impressive, but that doesn't mean that her complicated levels of involvement in the show aren't coming at a detriment to the show as a whole.
Natalie Nunn's involvement in Baddies should be focused behind the camera or she should join the cast and step back from production. If she wants to continue creating the show, she should stick to the behind-the-scenes work and appear on camera for the casting process, but not muddy the waters by also being part of the cast.
The fights go way too far (And they get repetitive)
Drama and fighting were a major part of Bad Girls Club and they're a central focus on Baddies, but the fights are part of what's holding the show back from the levels of greatness that the original series had. On Baddies, the fights are more regular and more intense and instead of just being a natural part of clashing personalities being put into a house together like on Bad Girls Club, they're almost the entire focus of Baddies.
From an entertainment perspective, fights on Baddies are no longer shocking and worth tuning in for.
Because the cast is so popular on social media, they often talk about fights and air out their grievances one another on their social media accounts, so fans can expect fights on the newest season of Baddies for two reasons: because the cast already shared all the fights on Instagram story essays and because fights are inevitable.
Meanwhile, from a human standpoint, the fights are more intense and there's no punishment for fights that go too far. On the original Bad Girls Club, fights that went too far were stopped by production and the cast members that were involved in the brutal altercations would be removed from the house and sent home for safety reasons, as is standard on most reality TV shows.
While Bad Girls Club was much more lenient with what they allowed as far as physical altercations than other reality TV shows tend to be, they weren't the entire focus of the series. Drama, relationships, and messiness were at the forefront of Bad Girls Club, but there was more of a storyline than just the women tearing into each other. Physical fights would happen from time to time, but there were consequences when someone went too far and put someone else in real danger.
Baddies lacks storylines that go beyond physical fights, making it harder for viewers to get into the series and feel invested in the relationships between the cast members and as the fights become more intense with each new season, it's not hard to see how someone could end up seriously injured someday without intervention from Zeus Network's production team.
The casting process needs to change
The real appeal of watching new seasons of Bad Girls Club was seeing a brand new group of women coming together to live in a house together with all the new friendships, new drama, and new personalities that came with it. Unfortunately, Baddies has developed something of a running cast of most of the same people over and over with each franchise, meaning that it doesn't have the fresh faces coming into each new season the way Bad Girls Club did.
When Baddies does get a new face on the cast, it has the same type of power balance issues that come from Natalie Nunn being on the production team and the cast. The veteran members of the Baddies franchise are given a leg-up immediately and it makes it difficult for anyone new to break into the show.
Along with the repetition of the same handful of cast members coming back over and over, a lot of the Baddies cast members have similar lifestyles, which takes away some of the charm and organic drama that came from Bad Girls Club.
While Bad Girls Club isolated a group of women from all walks of life in a house together, Baddies takes away the variety and the isolation, putting together a group of relatively similar women who all still have access to social media and who come with pre-existing connections to each other.