Like many people (I assume), I finished Girlboss over the weekend while I was in the throes of a particularly bad hangover. Why would I watch something that gave me a headache while I already had a headache, you ask? IDK, I guess I’m a masochist. As you can tell, I obviously did not like this show, no matter how much I wanted to. I mean, I loved Nasty Gal back in the day. One of my hobbies was to get home drunk from a night out, hit up the Nasty Gal sale section, and just pick a bunch of stuff and hope something would fit. I called it Nasty Gal Roulette. I, like many of us, wanted to like Girlboss. No, I never read the memoir, but I was still rooting for Sophia and Nasty Gal because I was actually interested how she created this insanely successful company. According to my friend who reads, Girlboss the book focused mainly on Sophie’s struggles to create a successful business from scratch. But Girlboss the show turned Sophie into an entitled awful person who you honestly want to go bankrupt. So without any more lofty introductions, I’m about to break down the most ridiculous parts of Girlboss. Girlboss, welcome to your tape.
1. The Wedding Dress Scene
Look, I KNOW this show was fictionalized. First of all, why? Why would you fictionalize a memoir? Memoirs are, by definition, works of nonfiction. It just makes no sense. Anyway, this wedding dress scene was ridiculous. First of all, you got into this whole mess of hand-delivering some lady her wedding dress because of a Coca-Cola stain, and yet the dress remains unscathed when you literally throw it over a wall and run it across the highway? And then when you LAY ON THE FUCKING GROUND? What kind of fantasy world does this show take place in? *Checks Google* Oh right, San Francisco.
And let’s discuss how she *magically* gives the bride her dress just as she’s about to start walking down the aisle. Again, I know this show is fictional, but I can only suspend my disbelief so much. This is completely absurd, and for no good reason. She could have given her the dress like, 10 minutes or even an hour before the wedding and it would have been just as suspenseful. There was no use for this corny, tired, deus ex machina B.S. None.
2. The First Date With Shane
This date episode almost made me give up on the show altogether. So you take this unsuspecting dude on an all-day breaking and entering and thievery extravaganza and drag him all around the city, make him pay for your burrito and everything, just to be like “This was not a date” at the end? Really? I guess this is the female equivalent of when guys on the street cat call you like “Hey ma, you look real nice today” and then when you don’t respond they’re like “Oh okay, acting like you didn’t hear me, pshh you’re ugly anyway.” Shane must be the nicest fictional guy in the world to not only go on a second date, but also date Sophia for two years after this. To put it into perspective, I almost didn’t go on a second date with a guy because he tried to convince me that New Jersey bagels are better than New York bagels. Now if he’d spent that first date instead dragging me around New Jersey on a string of petty crimes, you can best believe I would have called the police.
3. The Privilege Of It All
Okay so I know I should get off my SJW horse and all but I just watched 13th the other day, so strap in because we’re getting into some light racial commentary. This is not really a criticism of the show per se, just something that irked me on a personal level. First of all, I hated Sophia as a whole—which I’ll get into in a minute—but what really got me going was just like, her overwhelming audacity. “LOL let me just steal a rug for fun even though I can totally afford it if I just don’t act like a little brat to my dad for 30 minutes” has got to be the pinnacle of entitled white people shit. Oh right, no, I totally forgot that if a cute white girl does something illegal she’s not a thug, she’s just being quirky. Like, Trayvon got killed for walking around his neighborhood in a hoodie with a pack of Skittles but you’re just gonna break into a movie theater and steal some wine and… nvm.
4. Sophia’s Daddy Issues
Sophia’s daddy issues were a big part of her motivations for doing basically everything she did and I just… did not… understand…why? Like, her dad was this perfectly nice man who provided for his daughter and tried to take her out to dinner and give her money, and she acted like he killed her childhood puppy. I watched all the episodes and as far as I could see, Sophia’s dad’s only crime was being too “mainstream” aka an actual parent. Oh, your dad doesn’t want to cosign a lease for you unless his name’s on the lease when he’s taking all the financial risk and you can’t even hold down a retail job for more than a few months? I WONDER THE FUCK WHY. She throws this whole tantrum and storms out because her dad doesn’t “believe” in her dreams and it’s like… girl. You have zero credit. You’re one month away from being homeless. Your “job” is a hobby you started on a whim three months ago. You should be grateful your dad’s willing to do this for you at all! Somewhere out there, there are starving millennials who had to pay for their own Fyre Festival tickets.
5. The Portrayal Of Millennials
Speaking of millennials, any real millennial—or like, any real person tbh—would have taken their dad’s zero interest loan and fucking ran with it. But instead, the writers just made Sophia into this entitled pseudo-millennial who won’t take handouts but also doesn’t really work hard. So like, she just kinda sits there and does the occasional thing and waits for good fortune to fall into her lap? Don’t get me wrong, sitting by and waiting for good things to happen to me is definitely my side hustle, but it’s not my full-time gig. You can tell a non-millennial wrote this show because no person my age would ever act this way. And it sucks because the real Sophia Amoruso worked really hard to make Nasty Gal happen and like, actually realized learned stuff along the way, unlike her fictional counterpart.
6. The Fact That She Doesn’t Just Get Another eBay Store
Like, I know this was the early 2000s and all but when her eBay account got shut down why didn’t she just…open a new one? Under a different name? Did rebranding not exist in the early 2000s? I just don’t understand why she took what seemed like a multi-month hiatus at a crucial turning point in her business instead of just slapping something together real quick in the interim with a throwaway email account.
7. Christmas
The Christmas episode was so absurd that I’m probably going to have to split this into multiple subsections and pretty soon this is gonna be looking like your high school essay outlines. But anyway. Let’s start with how Sophia just buys a ticket from San Francisco to O’Hare on a whim, when she’s not making any money because (as I just mentioned) her eBay store has been shut down. How can she afford that? Christmas is LITERALLY the most expensive time of the year to fly, let alone last minute. And then she still has $2,000 cash to buy back that leather jacket she sold in the first episode? AND THEN later transfer her ticket to Wichita? So, to recap: she’s buying a last-minute ticket on the busiest travel day of the year, then transferring that ticket even more last-minute to a small airport, which according to my calculations would cost… approximately a billion dollars. But you’re broke. Sure, that adds up.
8. The Christmas Caroling Scene
This whole thing concerned me deeply. So you go to your nemesis’ house and you start caroling at full volume to get her attention? Yeah, no. Heard of a doorbell? Or just like, knocking with your special hands? Guess that’s too mainstream. And then you two stand there singing even though you have a flight to catch? This isn’t High School Musical. Fuck outta here with that shit. The writing in this scene reached its pinnacle of awfulness, too. I think the writers realized since they weren’t writing Downton Abbey or anything, it was fine to just phone it in. “You best understand I will be out here, waiting for my moment. You never know when I’m gonna strike” was probably the worst Breaking Bad rip-off line I’ve ever heard. And then Sophia bops Gail on the ear (?), so Gail physically restrains her (??) while telling her she’s a garbage person… I mean, it all just played out like a bad soap opera written for toddlers.
9. Her Mom
Let’s talk about Sophia’s mom for a hot sec. First of all, Sophia sees one little girl at the airport talking to her mom and boom, she’s switching her ticket to Wichita—apparently that’s all it took for a reconciliation with her estranged mother. That escalated quickly. How she knew her mom was in Kansas is not explained. Then when Dorothy she gets to Kansas, she somehow magically knows precisely which theater and which play to find her mom in. Okay. Then she goes up to her mom’s dressing room and her mom recognizes her right away through the reflection in her mirror even though they presumably haven’t seen each other in years. Like, her mom has got to have had some computer-generated sketch of what her daughter would look like in the future, because no human is that capable of facial recognition. But it’s all Gucci, though, because Sophia and her mom go straight into TMI sharing about banging Pete from 30 Rock in a bathroom and stealing a Christmas tree before Sophia even asks her mom any questions like “why you left us.” I mean, it’s really what any of us would have done if placed in an analogous situation.
10. The Cheating
I’ve rewatched this a number of times and Shane just goes from perfect, sweet boyfriend who’s writing cute love songs to this terrible cheater and NOTHING is explained. It’s all very disorienting. We don’t even learn that he cheated until Sophia is confronting him via public shaming in front of his entire band. I have a lot of questions, most of them being “What?” and “Why?” and “What just happened?” On the one hand, I kind of understand it because if some guy tried to convince me my job wasn’t legit when he was two weeks into a “job” of hocking secondhand clothes on eBay, I’d be fucking pissed. But then again, that happened like, 10 minutes into their relationship and he stuck with it for years afterward. So this is just a big question mark.
11. The Business Plan On A Napkin
I know I’m jumping back and forth in time a little bit, but just deal. Look, I am no business owner, and the closest thing I have to a business education is the one Microeconomics course I took in college, but I watch enough Shark Tank to know that business plans are complicated. You cannot just rattle off a complete business plan onto a napkin—I don’t care if you’re supposed to be some kind of business school prodigy (what was that even about, BTW?). So Dax, knowing nothing about Sophia’s company, comes up with this spot-on business plans that Sophia understands immediately and is able to explain to her dad over dinner. Meanwhile, this bitch can’t even figure her way out of Microsoft Word. Because creating bar graphs is way harder than understanding the financial intricacies of your company and your projected net worth… ok.
BONUS: Why Anyone Put Up With Sophia At All
Considering that my friends give me shit when I cancel plans (ugh, that was one time!), how Sophia has made it to young adulthood without ONCE being called on her shit is just infuriating. Truly not sure why all of her friends were fine with being treated like garbage—and more than that, they actually found it charming?? Yeah, I just loooove when my friends imply I’m stupid and useless even though I’ve been low-key running their entire company for free. Were they all drinking this girl’s Kool-Aid? Is she a witch and they were under a spell? The closest we get to someone calling Sophia out is when Shane calls her a narcissist. But like, calling Sophia a narcissist at that point is like calling Kylie Jenner vain—sure, it’s technically true but that doesn’t even scratch the surface of WTF is wrong here. Like, ok. I get that she wasn’t supposed to be a likable character but honestly, it’s a good thing this show came out after Sophia Amoruso left Nasty Gal, because otherwise I would have boycotted it after seeing this show. If I wanted my hard-earned money to fund a narcissist’s pipe dream, I would have voted for Trump.
