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How ‘The Bold Type’ Gave Us the Realest Female Friendships on TV Since…Ever?


Can you think of anyone you’d rather talk to about friendship than the cast of The Bold Type? Me neither, which is why I spoke with the holy trinity of BFFs themselves—Katie Stevens, Aisha Dee and Meghann Fahy—about just that during a recent visit to the set of the Freeform show, which returns tonight.

The Bold Type has been hailed by fans and critics alike for its nuanced, diverse portrayals of young working women—something that’s unfortunately come few and far between on TV. Each character has a unique storyline, yes, but it still feels as if most women could find a situation or a character they relate to. Whether you connect to Jane (Stevens) and her passionate pursuit of a writing career, Kat (Dee) and her exploration of sexuality, or Sutton (Fahy) and the trials and tribulations of dating, they all have a different take on the world. Those adventures will continue in the third season, and while the trio wouldn’t reveal too much about what’s ahead, they did promise more of the friend porn we’ve come to love and expect.

“What we’re trying our best to do with The Bold Type is to represent [friendships] in the way that we all experience them,” Dee tells Glamour. “We talk about our sex lives. We talk about our periods. We talk about how bloated we feel today. All of that is such a big part of the human experience, and the experience as a woman.”

At the end of season two, each woman’s romantic relationships were pushed to the brink: Jane was forced to choose between the two men in her life, Pinstripe and Ben (and we still don’t know whom she picked); Sutton finally reunited with her ex, Richard; Kat examined the ways in which her relationship to Adena might have negatively affected her girlfriend’s work. But as usual, the northern star of the show was—and remains—Jane, Kat, and Sutton’s friendships with each other.

“I definitely think there’s something special about our show and how we showcase female friendship, navigating your way through your twenties in the workplace, and just living in today’s America,” Stevens says. For her it’s important that The Bold Type highlight each woman’s flaws and downfalls and then examine how those traits inform their relationships with one another. That is, after all, what we experience in real-life friendships with other women.

“The legs that the show stands on are the friendships between the three of us,” Stevens says. “An episode won’t go by without the three of us together hashing through something or being there for each other when something goes wrong.” She promises more of that in season three—in part because her off-screen relationships with Dee and Fahy are eerily similar.

Jane (Katie Stevens), Kat (Aisha Dee), and Sutton (Mehgann Fahy) in the season three premiere of The Bold Type

Philippe Bosse/Freeform

“[The show] reflects our relationship in real life,“ Stevens continues. “If we’re on set and one of us is not having the best day, the other two are like, ’All right, today’s your day. We’re going to lift you up.’”

Fahy tells me that—just like her, Stevens, and Dee—other women often tell the cast that they see themselves in these characters. These fans relate to the good, the bad, and the ugly. “So many people come up to us and say, ‘Oh, I’m a Jane!‘ Or, ‘I’m a Kat, and my best friend’s a Sutton. We watch the show together!’” Fahy agrees with costar Dee’s outlook on the ways in which female friendships are portrayed on this show versus how they’ve been historically depicted in film and TV (which is, uh, poorly).

“There are so many negative portrayals of female relationships in the media, and I think what’s more true than those are the ones on our show,“ Fahy says. “We are girls who communicate with each other, girls who fight but who listen to each other, girls who apologize when they’ve hurt somebody. That to me is more of an honest representation of female friendship than a lot of the other things out there right now.”



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Amy Schumer’s Growing Review: Her New Netflix Special Is the Realest Take on Pregnancy Yet


By all accounts, Amy Schumer has not had an easy pregnancy. The comedian has a condition called hyperemesis gravidarum, often referred to as “extreme morning sickness,” that caused her to cancel much of her tour. She gets brutally real about this—and other aspects of her pregnancy—in her new Netflix special, Growing, out now. At one point in the special, Schumer compares hyperemesis to “having food poisoning every day for the last five months.” “I throw up an Exorcist amount every day,” she jokes, before revealing she was once hospitalized after vomiting for five hours straight. This is all to say that if anyone deserves a little special treatment during their pregnancy, it’s Schumer.

But one of the strongest parts of Growing is the way Schumer takes on society’s impulse to treat pregnant people in a precious way—like they’re angelic, wholesome, cutesy parodies of women. As if we’re all having a magical time gestating a human. “I didn’t know that being pregnant could be really hard,” she says. “You bitches all lie about it.”

She attacks the pregnant-woman trope seen in romantic comedies: a lady throws up—once!—in her office, realizes she’s expecting, and is suddenly wearing overalls, painting, and cupping her bump in the next scene. The implication here: Even if you’re not an overall-wearing, crafty, lovey-dovey person, pregnancy will turn you into one. But “you’re still you,” Schumer says, pointedly.

Netflix

This resonated loudly with me as a new mom. I didn’t spontaneously turn into a cartoon mother once I got knocked up. Once I revealed I was pregnant, it felt like the baby was all anyone wanted to talk about—even if I didn’t want to talk about it. Yes, to a degree this was a preview of what motherhood is like, but Schumer’s material is a reminder that our own existences shouldn’t take a backseat. Women are still important, relevant, and interesting outside of their pregnancies.

Schumer skewers this by revealing that she greets the myriad of “What are you having?” questions she fields every day with a despondent “hemorrhoids.” She screams “cock!” when asked, “What are you craving?” “Just me and my angel,” she says in a saccharine voice after telling this anecdote, caressing her bump, almost daring the audience to admit they were expecting her to be somehow softer or sweeter as a pregnant woman. Nope. She’s still her.

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When I was pregnant, I often joked I had something called “pregnancy rage.” Instead of, say, weeping at car insurance commercials (another pregnancy trope), I felt mad a lot, particularly about the way pregnant women are infantilized by the exact stereotypes Schumer brings up. I can’t definitively say Schumer has pregnancy rage too, but she certainly felt like my kindred spirit as I watched Growing. She hates the way pregnant women always cup their bumps in photos—“it’s so obnoxious”—and doesn’t understand why people think she’s a hero for just showing up to work. “I’m contractually obligated to be out here, guys,” she says. “I’m not like, ‘The show must go on.’ I’m like, ‘I will be sued.'” She hates women who say they enjoyed their pregnancies. She hates when people ask to see her bump, so much that she hikes her dress up at the beginning of the special and flashes it to the audience. A bump middle finger, if you will.

Amy Schumer in her 2019 Netflix comedy special Growing.
Netflix

To be fair, pregnancy is giving Schumer a lot to hate. But even as someone who had a relatively easy and uncomplicated pregnancy, I felt so seen by her derision. Pregnancy is more present in comedy than ever before—just see Ali Wong’s two specials—but what’s particularly satisfying about watching Amy Schumer is right there in the title: She’s growing, but she’s still her. And it’s cathartic to watch.



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Sharon Horgan Is the Realest Mother on TV


In a world short on joy, humor can be a unifier and a survival tool. In that spirit, we bring you our Comedy Issue, a month-long celebration of funny (and fearless) women and the enduring power of a good laugh.

Before she was one of comedy’s most cult-loved voices, Sharon Horgan was adrift. After moving to London from a turkey farm in rural Ireland, she waited tables, toiled away at an office job, and even sold bongs to stoners. “A lot of trying and failing,” she recalls of her twenties. “I basically did everything I could possibly do to avoid starting my actual, genuine career.”

Then, at 35, she and longtime friend and ­fellow lackey Dennis Kelly wrote a sitcom all about their professional shortcomings. The raunchy Pulling, which aired on the BBC from 2006 to 2009, was a success—and a wake-up call. “With Pulling I found out that writing about something tragic and sad can be fully hilarious if you look at it from a slightly different angle,” she says. “I haven’t wanted to write in a different way since.”

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Sure, she’s the mother dragon behind foul-mouthed tragicomedies like Divorce and Motherland. But it’s Catastrophe, the Amazon show she co-created and stars in, that elevated her to the comedic pantheon. She’s earned a Best Writing Emmy nomination for the show and a BAFTA nod for her turn as Sharon Morris, an Irish woman in London who gets pregnant after a weeklong hookup with American Rob Norris (Rob Delaney) and dives headfirst into an unlikely relationship. (The story is based on Horgan’s own life. Six months after meeting British entrepreneur Jeremy Rainbird, she found out she was expecting. The couple is now married, with two daughters.)

The plot may sound like the setup for a schmaltzy rom com, but Catastrophe approaches everything from alcoholism and infidelity to motherhood with uproarious frankness. In season two, for example, Sharon is desperate to return to work after her second child is born. “To be honest, I didn’t realize how much I love teaching until I had to be around my own kids 24 hours a day,” she tells a stunned job interviewer before admitting that “it’s just hard…to know how to do things” and bursting into tears. “Sharon’s not afraid to admit when she’s lonely or depressed or any of those things you feel when you’re a mother,” Horgan, now 48, says. “She can be sweet and loving and scared and needy. And, equally, she can have balls of steel. I don’t know if that’s more common for Irish women, but I’ve got two personalities inside of me at all times.”

PHOTO: Ed Miller

Comedy of Errors

Horgan, in the season three finale of Catastrophe, says that “writing about something tragic can be hilarious.”

Directness, friends confirm, is a Horgan trademark. “She’s quite straightforward,” Kelly says. “I don’t think she analyzes herself or what she’s doing, and I don’t think she wants to. Partly because Sharon doesn’t want to be a wanker.” Says Delaney: “When we’re writing, we’re like two technicians in lab coats with the exact same goal of producing the best possible scripts. She’s taught me a lot about stories that make ironclad sense.”

“I don’t think she analyzes herself or what she’s doing, and I don’t think she wants to. Partly because Sharon doesn’t want to be a wanker.”

Despite the series’ brisk pace—each season is composed of six 24-minute episodes—the emotional center always holds. At the end of last season, Sharon is grappling with her dad’s recent death. “She’s not grieving properly. She’s not feeling the things she thinks she ‘should’ be feeling,” Horgan says. “One of the mums from my daughter’s school came up to me on the playground and said, ‘I have those same feelings. They made me feel awful, and [after watching], I feel a little less awful.’ That’s been our yardstick: to say things that maybe seem a bit gross or terrible and then be pleasantly surprised that other people feel them too.”

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Horgan’s gift is finding the humanity in the humor. “When I look at Sharon’s work, I don’t think of it as deliberately dark,” Kelly says. “I think she’s just being honest about the world as she sees it.” And, for her, the funniest moments don’t require a clever pun or a zany coincidence. “It has to make us laugh. If we’re not laughing several times per page, we’re not doing it. But it doesn’t have to be a ridiculous sort of gag, either. It can be something so true it’s funny,” she says. “We like there to be two good story lines running solidly through the beginning, middle, and end. We don’t like to just have a series of events. We like shit to happen.”



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