Show + Tell with Paul Flynn
THE WOMEN’S MAGAZINE
office has become something of a screen trope ever since Joanna Lumley first took the editor’s chair to fizzing new levels of high camp and debauchery in Ab Fab. Ugly Betty and The Devil Wears Prada both riffed on the idea of the wholesome new girl in the office, squaring up against a hard-nosed boss. The patron saint of all these women’s magazine grande dames is that inscrutable, hotly shod milestone of her era, Carrie Bradshaw. Even Lena Dunham got an interning slot for two seasons of Girls.
Now we have a new girl in town: perky Jane Sloan (Katie Stevens) in The Bold
Type. Jane looks like she could be Emily Ratajkowski’s little sister. She has enough ready-to-wear lewks to become a minor fashion talking point herself. Jane has just been promoted to a full writer’s position after four years assisting at
Scarlet magazine. Scarlet is a magazine about ‘stealth feminism’, explained cutely as ‘you’re not having sex to please him – or her – you’re having it to please you’. Her first assignment is ‘how to stalk your unstalkable ex’.
Jane’s editor-in-chief is Jacqueline Carlyle (Melora Hardin), a post-weinstein Miranda Priestly who instructs her young find that there are two types of writer at
Scarlet, the safe hands and the big swingers. It might not just be Jane proving herself as the latter. Her first Fashion Closet BFF Kat is questioning her sexuality over a Muslim lesbian portrait artist and her second FCBFF Sutton is taking regular booty calls from one of the suited Scarlet executive board. Everyone’s a bit swingy in The Bold Type. The clue’s in the ‘ bold’.
It’s a sweet and highly watchable treatment of familiar subject matter. Jane, Kat and Sutton are likeable sorts, as they try out ‘position of the month’ on plush office furniture and navigate their places in the working world. Because it comes from the memoirs of former Cosmo editor-in-chief Joanna Coles, the magazine rhythm and pitch feels right, if not quite the fantastical sales figures and budgets. It’s pleasing to watch something so pro-magazines, too. An inch more bite and The Bold Type could be Gossip Girl goes to the workplace. It could still be, once it gets into its stride. Begins streaming Friday, Amazon Prime