What is it? A Girlboss is a spoiled, egocentric vacuum with a tiny bottom and no empathy.
Why you’ll love it: If you watch Girlboss and love it, I want you to get help. It is a “comedy” loosely based on the autobiography of startup millionaire Sophia Amoruso who made her fortune a decade ago (when this is set) with her vintage fashion brand, Nasty Gal. They have since filed for bankruptcy.
It all starts with a girl in a bedroom in San Francisco, wishing she could opt out of adulthood and just please herself all day. We meet her pushing a clapped-out car up a hill while wearing an outfit barely covering her butt-cheeks. If real Sophia is anything like fictional Sophia (played by the otherwise excellent Britt Robertson, the spunky teen from Tomorrowland) then she deserves none of her success and should immediately hand over every cent to charity for crimes against humanity.
Fictional Sophia is a walking selfie, whining about having to work for a living. She says “love you in case I die!” whenever she bids farewell to her best friend. And she inexplicably steals food out of dumpsters despite having a dad who offers to help her out financially. It’s a show which fully mistakes being an overindulged horror-show for being an assertive millennial role model.
According to show creator and writer Kay Cannon, a Girlboss is “opinionated, confident, feisty” and, you know, strong or something. She and her co-producers (of whom Charlize Theron is one) are trying to make Girlboss the new Girl Power: the same vapid, non-specific, something-to-do-with-feminism-in-hot pants fluff but with added narcissism and less of a sense of humour.
Girlboss is so unrelentingly tone-deaf to the human condition it’s hard to know where to start. It purports to be not only Sophia’s story but a rallying cry to dyspeptic, wasteful goons everywhere who think the world owes them a lovely time with zero input or effort expended.
The cry is: do what you like and figure it all out as you go along because you’re probably fabulous. Sophia’s epiphany here isn’t one of self-knowledge. She just finds an expensive jacket going cheap in a thrift store, sells it on eBay for hundreds, and cries. Money makes her cry. It’s everything wrong with the world today, distilled into a single, selfish tear.
She has no romance in her heart because all that’s at stake is her success. Trying to drag a romantic subplot over the top of it only serves to highlight her dreadfulness further, rather than showing her vulnerability. When Sophia has a sleepover with a boy and he remarks afterwards that he doesn’t know why, but he likes her, she smirks back, “You’ll figure it out,” before forcing him to make ocean sounds to help her sleep. She is unrootable-for.
An impressive supporting cast including RuPaul Charles as Sophia’s pot-smoking neighbour and Dean Norris from Breaking Bad as her concerned dad, cannot help this hammeringly unfunny script.
“Adulthood is where dreams go to die,” whinges Sophia to a random old woman on a park bench who she sometimes uses as a sounding board. Girlboss is a show that could do with a grown-up in charge, because these kids have made a real mess of it.
Where: Netflix
Length: Thirteen 30-minute episodes, available to stream now.
Stand-out episode: Watch the tension headache that is episode one and tell me if you made it any further. I liked episode 13 best when it ended.
If you liked Girlboss, watch: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (Netflix), Don’t Trust the Bitch in Apartment 23 (Netflix).
