Girlboss is shallow, flippant and ultimately hard to resist: review
Girlboss is inspired by the real-life rags-to-riches tale of Sophia Amoruso, a drop-out and sometime shoplifter who graduated from flogging second-hand clothes on eBay to heading a multi-million-dollar fashion brand. But the story comes with a bittersweet twist, with Amoruso stepping down as executive chairwoman of Nasty Gal in November 2016 as the business filed for bankruptcy.
Whether Netflix’s new comedy-drama, created by Pitch Perfect screenwriter Kay Cannon, will get around to chronicling Nasty Gal’s crash and burn in a future season is unclear. The first run of episodes is nakedly hagiographical, with heroine “Sophia Marlowe” (Tomorrowland’s Britt Robertson) portrayed as feisty, irreverent and endlessly lovable.
She’s a force of nature never short of a pearl of hipster wisdom (“we all just walk around like sheep in a jail of capitalism“) who sees life lessons everywhere, even when reduced to fishing a (suspiciously pristine) bagel from a dumpster.
Girlboss takes its title from Amoruso’s 2014 autobiography / self-help manual and the businesswoman is, along with actress Charlize Theron, an executive producer. So it is scarcely surprising that Netflix should glibly side-step the potentially darker aspects of the story (we eventually learn her waywardness is the fault of the mother who abandoned her a decade previously).
The onscreen Sophia, it is true, starts out a walking disaster, unable to hold down a job, behind in her rent, semi-estranged from her father (Dean Norris, aka Hank from Breaking Bad). However, when she is fired from her shop assistant’s position in San Francisco (for eating her manager’s sandwich) the plucky underdog turns her life around with an effortless finger-snap.
A vintage leather jacket stumbled upon in a second-hand store turns out to be a collector’s item worth 10 times what she paid for it. Thereafter her rise through the fashion ranks feels as preordained as a rocket blasting towards the stratosphere. A smattering of secondary characters, meanwhile, exist simply to bask in the lead’s glory, though Ellie Reed and RuPaul Charles do their best as a loyal best friend and irreverent neighbour.
But, if the eponymous protagonist is presented in an unconvincingly reverential light, the series nevertheless gets a lot right. Cannon was a writer on 30 Rock and her new project shares that show’s agreeable freneticism and whipsmart tempo. It also evokes the grit and glamour of mid-2000s San Francisco, when it was still possible to live in genteel poverty in America’s tech capital. Girlboss is shallow and flippant and, just like its heroine, skates by on little beyond wit and style. Yet its scruffy charms are ultimately hard to resist.
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