It’s not a good time to be a Nasty Gal—or at least, to be Nasty Gal founder Sophia Amoruso. The onetime Girlboss has lost her fortune and her company, and now, she’s losing her Netflix show, too. Girlboss has been canceled after just one season—not because it was too expensive, which has been the streaming giant’s go-to line in the past, but because it was terrible.
Netflix recently announced that it plans to cancel more shows as part of a drive for bolder content. As the company’s founder and C.E.O. Reed Hastings put it, “I’m always pushing the content team: ‘We have to take more risk, you have to try more crazy things. Because we should have a higher cancel rate overall.’” Per Hastings, the decision to ax a series comes down to “a mix” of factors, but “mostly, it is how many people watch.” Netflix famously doesn’t release viewership numbers, so there’s no way to tell just how many eyeballs its most recently canceled series—including The Get Down, Sense8, Marco Polo, and Bloodline—garnered. All of these series do, however, have a few things in common: they’re hour-long dramas featuring multiple locations; big, complicated set-piece scenes; and huge-name talent either behind or in front of the camera. Each one also garnered middling reviews at worst, though all four also had fans in the critical community; Bloodline even had four Emmy nominations and one win under its belt. Combined, these factors make for expensive shows that just aren’t worth continuing if they’re also underperforming in terms of audience, regardless of how critics feel.
As a half-hour sitcom stocked with less name-brand talent, Girlboss was a much less costly enterprise—which under other circumstances may have meant holding on to the show for at least one more year in order to let its audience grow. Perhaps, then, it was the incredibly harsh reviews Girlboss garnered—and the increasingly toxic nature of its subject—that prompted Netflix to cancel Girlboss so soon, marking something of a first for the streaming company.
Netflix bought the rights to the show when Amoruso’s company was still solvent. Amoruso thought it would be good free marketing for her brand. Unfortunately for both parties involved, neither anticipated a lawsuit claiming that four former Nasty Gal employees got fired right before they left for maternity leave—or, as many interpreted it, for getting pregnant. (Not a good look for a brand that claims to be all about female empowerment.) In a statement, Nasty Gal called the accusation “false, defamatory, and taken completely out of context,” but the damage was done. The company filed for bankruptcy a year later, and was eventually acquired for a mere $20 million. (It was once valued at over $200 million.) All of this put a severe damper on a once-buzzy heroine who easily sold a comedy about her journey from a dumpster-diving anarchist to a punky C.E.O., and likely inspired even Nasty Gal customers and the women who’d bought Amoruso’s book to steer clear of her show.
But Girlboss itself didn’t reflect that harsh reality. The show tried too hard to portray Amoruso as consistently better and more savvy than the strawmen who slight her throughout the series, inspiring critics to call the show a letdown at best, and a “tone-deaf rallying cry to millennial narcissists” at worst. Perhaps its biggest fault was its unrelenting refusal to truly examine any of Amoruso’s flaws, which the series instead played off as quirks, shortchanging the one asset it had—dramatic irony, as presumably most of its viewers knew about the Icarus-like downfall to come. As Vanity Fair’s own review concluded, “Girlboss can’t figure out a satisfying way to reconcile its sunny, girl-power alternate history with the reality of Nasty Gal—and the central irony of Amoruso herself, that she built a brand based on her business success without actually building a successful business. Nasty as the fictional Sophia is, the show wants us to shrug off her trespasses because she’s cute, and because she’s good at what she does. The problem, though, is that you can’t exactly be an asshole genius if you’re not a genius to begin with.”
Creators and performers whose projects get drubbed by critics love to fire back that they’re creating something “not for critics, but for the fans”. But you can’t exactly make a project for the fans if there are no fans to begin with.
