Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce: Glamorizing Wealth and Whitewashing Racial Difference
This review is actually a retrospective of the series, which ran on Bravo for 5 seasons, from 2014–2018 (now streaming on Netflix). It stars Lisa Edelstein as Abby McCarthy, the author of the wildly successful “Girlfriends’ Guide” book series. It’s a straightforward rom-com premise: the women’s self-help guru has a personal life that is seemingly always on the brink of disaster. She has two kids with her smarmy on-again, off-again stay at home dad/wannabe director husband Jake (Paul Epstein), from whom she cannot seem to extricate herself. Abby is rounded out by her best friends Phoebe (Beau Garrett), Delia (Necar Zadegan), and Jo (Alanna Ubach). If these women all seem thinly painted at first, it’s because they’re all social types that should be familiar to most viewers. Phoebe is the hot model who is searching for deeper meaning in life; Delia is the “boss bitch” workaholic who struggles to commit to anything meaningful outside of work (and her girlfriends, ofc); Jo is the hot and fiery Latina (yikes!) who is trying to clean up her act for her daughter. I will say that as derivative as these women are, they are all consistently more interesting than Abby and her narcissistic, WASPY “single white female” problems.
