(Maybe that’s the key to Amoruso’s will-to-power success. But it is confusing that her grating selfishness appears to read as charm to the other characters in the show. She founded the vintage eBay store turned online retailer and phenomenon, Nasty Gal, back in 2006, and then scaled the business to over 100 million in. Netflix announced yesterday that it would release 1,000 hours of original content this year and dropped release dates for a whole host of new series, including one based on the life of Nasty. But even with that framework, it’s hard to tell if the show admires Sophia or finds her useful as the butt of every joke. “Girlboss” skews young-adult, and shows for teenagers are a little more comfortable showcasing emotional rollercoasters. It’s hard to tell how intentional or nuanced this performance is, because to put it bluntly, Sophia is frequently just awful - a tiny whirlwind who has trouble metabolizing other people’s emotions. Flash forward to today, and shes the founder of Nasty Gal and the founder and CEO of Girlboss. Robertson brings a manic energy to the character - an overwrought emotionality that is sometimes entirely plausible and sometimes off-puttingly mannered. Watching Sophia find and resell a vintage leather jacket at the end of the first episode has an inevitable, thrilling, superhero-origin-story feeling to it.īut Sophia herself is a frustrating hero. “Girlboss” is about Amoruso finding and monetizing her aesthetic sensibilities, so it makes sense that the show has its own style consciousness, alerting the viewer to the idiosyncrasies of the pre-recession hipster scene. The show begins in 2006 San Francisco, with Sophia ( Britt Robertson) careening around the city trying to escape the eviction notice taped to her door, and the atmosphere it builds is a captivating, tangible one: Vintage stores, dive bars, dingy apartments, and trying-too-hard mannered young people.

Nasty gal series