The Bold Type Isn’t Exactly the Everyday Feminist Show We Want it to be — but it’s Close
As is expected with any show on Freeform and nearly every show written about young women in the big city, the women of The Bold Type find love, make mistakes at work, and laugh in a bathtub with their girlfriends. Unlike many of its YA made-for-television counterparts, however, The Bold Type centers on the lives and professional accomplishments of three very real, very flawed, and very supportive young women instead of focusing *just* on their love live and inevitable f*ck ups. The women have relationships, yes, but it’s almost never the most important part of the story. When it is, their partners lean away from being condescending jerks who criticize them for their accomplishments and complain about being “locked down.” Since its debut early this summer, and a rough pilot episode, the show has found a strong following online on Tumblr and Twitter for young adults who are loving watching women who empower and encourage each other, have bold career aspirations, and live life unabashedly for themselves.
It feels slightly revolutionary.
The Bold Type focuses on three young women working at Scarlet, a fashion and beauty magazine helmed by balanced editor-in-chief Jacqueline Carlyle. Played brilliantly by The Office’s Melora Hardin, Jacqueline is committed to making Scarlet a “feminist magazine” that offers real stories and content that real women want to read and share. The idea that women’s magazines are feminist at their core is a flawed one, but The Bold Type does its best to stick to it. Originally inspired by the life of former EIC of Cosmopolitan, Joanna Coles, the show ends up revolving a lot more around the lives of Jane Sloan, a recently promoted staff writer, Kat Edison, the magazine’s director of social media, and Sutton Brady, an assistant with a dream of working in fashion.
Jane, Kat, and Sutton are best friends. They met when they all started at the magazine as assistants and have supported each other as they’ve grown through the ranks and into their careers. When it first starts out the show feels very much as if it’s trying to recreate the magic of The Devil Wears Prada. The women work at a glossy magazine and manage to pull together immaculate outfits with their starting level salaries; they get frustrated with each other and their jobs and scream at trains in the subway to vent their frustrations; they even have a high-powered boss who, at first take, is a power woman with cropped hair, inappropriate leather pants, and an impressive resting b*tch face.
For Jane’s first writing assignment, her editor sends her to write a piece on an ex boyfriend that left her stranded in a train station. The show sets itself up to drive home a storyline about the hijinks Jane and her girls will get into following this boy around the city, and how humiliating it will be for her to have to admit she’s still hurt by what he did. By episode two, however, The Bold Type slightly changes its tune. The women are genuinely best friends and they support each other through personal hang-ups, life mistakes, and professional faux pas.
The thing about Jane, Kat, and Sutton, however, is that they don’t make many. Sure, they have their ups and downs throughout the season, but The Bold Type isn’t built around the idea that all young women are secretly a mess and hugely unsatisfied with their lives.
Instead, the women of The Bold Type are learning. They’re learning who they are and what it means to be a young woman in 2017. Whether it’s Kat discovering love with a beautiful muslim photographer and exploring her first lesbian relationship, or Jane revealing that she’s never had an orgasm, the show explores storylines that feel a little more realistic than the 1200 murders taking place on cult YA shows like PLL.
Throughout the first season we see Jane battle her family’s history with breast cancer, Kat fight the patriarchy and Instagram’s nudity policy, and Sutton realize that her dreams are still valuable even if they won’t make her mountains of dollar bills. The storylines may be somewhat muted, but the conversations the characters are having feel real. They feel like conversations I’ve had with my own friends as we sit laughing our asses off over too much pink wine and reality television reruns. They feel like conversations we’ve all had when we’re struggling to figure out who it is we want to be and what it feels like to be young but feel old and as if you’re running out of time.
The women also borrow some serious inspiration from their wonderful boss, Jacqueline. Where in previous shows and movies about the magazine industry the editor-in-chief has always been represented as alone, bitchy, and dismissive, Jacqueline is exceptionally good at her job and she’s unapologetic for it. In fact, at numerous points throughout the season Jacqueline tells board members and entire rooms of old white men that she believes in her ideas and plans on executing them, whether or not they agree with her. She is fiercely supportive and inspiring to Jane, Kat, and Sutton when they most need it and encouraging when they stumble in their work. When Jane fumbles as a speaker at a political panel Jacqueline doesn’t stop doubting her. Instead she offers her more responsibility and platform in its wake. For most women, having a boss like this, especially one who isn’t depicted as tearing other women down, or throwing ridiculous challenges at employees and laughing at them when they fail, is a rarity.
Unlike most conventionally successful women portrayed on television Jacqueline also has a loving husband and two children. After a particularly personal article topic causes Jane to yell at her patient boss in the middle of the office, Jacqueline invites her to her home (a home that looks strikingly like the Van der Woodson/Bass/Humphrey residence in Gossip Girl, I might add), and introduces her to her family. This scene is important because it forces Jane to realize something about her own love life. Up until that point she’d been having a rough but delicious romp with a writer at a rival magazine, Pinstripe. Ryan is a sex and relationship writer. He meets with Jane early in the season and after randomly making out at a gallery exhibit, the two begin sleeping together regularly. After this meeting with Jacqueline and her family, however, Jane realizes that she wants a relationship like Jacqueline has with her own husband for herself. At that point Ryan is hooking up with other people (perks of being a sex writer, I suppose) and she breaks it off with him once she realizes they aren’t looking for the same thing. The value of this story line isn’t that she breaks it off with Ryan, or really that she discovers this new information about herself. Instead, it’s The Bold Type’s depiction of what this break up looks like that empowering and a quickly becoming a hallmark of this show. Instead of believing that she could eventually change Ryan or inserting a quirky “Jane and her friends follow Ryan to see if he’s sleeping with other people” storyline, Jane realizes what she wants, breaks it off, and walks away from the relationship — a relationship that she was largely in control of, by the way — with her perfectly glossed head held high.
The Bold Type isn’t written for 18 year old girls and it isn’t written for 30 year old women. It’s written for those of us still trapped in the middle. For many of us, it has taken this long — until, as Sutton says, the old age of 26 — to figure out what it is we want, let alone build the courage to go after it. We’re adults, and we’re figuring out what that means, but we’re also undeniably lost, overwhelmed, fighting tooth and nail toward our dreams. Shows like The Bold Type help. It helps to see real and encouraging friendships on television. It helps to see ambitious and confused characters struggling to find their voice or purpose, but believing in it once they have. It helps to see young women taking on real issues like breast cancer, censorship, pay inequality, sexuality, and racism in a time when we’re still told to sit down and be quiet with our opinions.
More than anything, the characters and storylines of The Bold Type feel like a fantasy version of what the world would look like if women were respected for standing up for their worth. For many women, working in an office where you aren’t belittled for what sits beneath your skirt isn’t a reality. Many more face condescension and sexism on a daily basis, whether it’s at work, online, or the gas station.
So, until they announce the second season (come on ABC!) and the television industry finally hires enough female writers, producers, and executives across all races, orientations, and backgrounds to be remotely representative of what the world actually looks like… I’m okay taking Jane, Kat, and Sutton as new everyday heroes.
