The Bold is immersed in the current events. Free of the drama about three 20 years working in media in the fiction Scarlet the magazine in the City of New York often feels forced (I don’t know many women in the media who have that a lot of time to traipse around the city in a day’s work), but where the show really shines is with the way in which it carries heavy conversations that occur around us every day and results in the show in a way that makes you think without making you feel like someone is pushing their views down your throat.
When I say The Bold tackles some really heavy conversations, I mean really, really heavy themes that are at once personal and universal. Jane Sloan (Katie Stevens), one of the main characters of the show, lost his mother to breast cancer when she was young, and then learns that she has a mutation in the BRCA1 gene, making her susceptible to breast cancer. It is a challenge that she deals with multiple seasons of exposure before you decide to get a double preventive mastectomy — it is not a topic commonly discussed on TV and, definitely, not the comments of someone so young, though breast cancer is the most common cancer in women in this age group. The topic was presented in a way that makes you care about Jane and how it is handling your own diagnosis, but showing the viewer what happens next. What happens after the diagnosis, the surgery, etc, Shows you how to cope.
One of the most universal of the themes of today The Bold addressed in the program, however, was the control of weapons. Sutton Brady (Meghann Fahy), who grew up in rural Pennsylvania, has a secret gun that he keeps in his apartment with Jane, but when Jane finds out, that he had to have a long conversation about why she has the gun and why Jane is not well with him. To carry this theme in a country that is riddled with arms control issues in a way that was less about shooting and more about why Sutton has a gun gives viewers another way of looking at things. For Sutton, that had to do with his memories of shooting in a controlled environment, while growing up, but after examining the situation and talk it through like adults, she decided to get rid of the gun because she knew that they were not needed.
The Bold set each episode to standardize the topics that people maybe don’t want to talk. If it is Jane telling a crowd of people who has a yeast infection from a spa treatment that is supposed to recommend or Kat (Aisha Dee) tour executive Scarlet to support a politician who advocates for conversion therapy, The Bold not afraid to go there. In a moment, Jane comes even after that the famous photographer with several related abuse allegations against her because she did not want more models to be subject to those conditions of work. The argument of putting the idea front and center that it doesn’t matter who you are or how much money or prizes that you win, is not an excuse for horrendous behavior as abusing those who work for you.
But perhaps the most powerful and heartbreaking story The Bold it was one about the rape. At the end of the first season, the program introduced a very similar history to the Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia University rape survivor that takes her around the mattress she was raped on. In The Bolda young woman named Mia, suffered a similar fate, but instead of that the show focuses largely on the trauma of the rape, is focused on coping with it. And in the most heartbreaking twist, Scarlet the editor-in-chief of Jacqueline Carlyle (Melora Hardin) reveals to Jane that she is also a survivor — that he had been assaulted by a previous editor and he never said anything about it. The show went on the air in the year 2017, in the middle of #MeToo movement and gave another voice to the story.
While The Bold masterfully handles these sensitive topics in a way that shows a new point of view that has not yet thought about or reaffirmed how they felt, the fourth season feels like fall with these stories. Despite the fact that Jane has been openly dealing with her double mastectomy this season, the rest of the recent episodes have felt a little lackluster in terms of difficult topics. It is not that the episodes are less enjoyable, but for a show that has built a reputation in the fight against the hard-to-handle stories, I would not like to see them disappear.
The program can take some creative liberties with joyful songs (seriously, how do they get from Brooklyn to Manhattan SO fast?), but on the important issues, the showrunners and the cast handle it with care and really give her something to think about. It is a show that likely to break because it humanizes these issues that don’t always feel real, because it is not in our own daily lives. They are exactly the difficult issues that we need to normalize talking about, though, and it is expected The Bold keeps bringing them.
