A lot in the world has changed since last we saw the foursome at the center of Jordan Weiss’s Hulu female-centric sitcom “Dollface.” A global pandemic, quarantine, social unrest, rampant targeted hate crimes. The pre-pandemic Season 1 was about Jules discovering the power of female friendships while reconnecting with her besties after neglecting them during her five-year relationship. Unfortunately, not only does Season 2 lose sight of this core tenet, but regardless of all this upheaval in the world around them, the privileged lives of these women don’t seem to be much affected. Despite its desperate strive to be feminist™, the show has mostly devolved into yet another generic girl-com.
READ MORE: The 70 Most Anticipated TV Shows & Mini-Series Of 2022
As Season 1 closed, Jules (Kat Dennings) finally realized she was over her erstwhile boyfriend Jeremy (Connor Hines) while attending his vain sister’s destination wedding. She also outed her best friend Madison (Brenda Song)’s doctor boyfriend Colin (Goran Visnjic) as the cheating spouse of her wellness guru boss Celeste (Malin Åkerman). Flighty party girl Stella (Shay Mitchell) announced she was moving to Philly to attend business school, while co-worker Izzy (Esther Povitsky) was still mostly just along for the ride.
Coincidentally this destination wedding took place roughly in March 2020, although the episode had been filmed and released in 2019, allowing Season 2 to loop in the pandemic by chalking the incident up as an early superspreader event. The rest of 2020 is shown through a montage of cellphone and Zoom footage. Jules and Madison quarantined some of the time together. Stella finished a year at Wharton. Izzy met her new boyfriend Liam (Jayson Blair) in a Zoom happy hour. Cut to summer 2021, and other than a few lasting personal connections—Izzy’s boyfriend, Madison was furloughed, then let go from her lucrative job at a P.R. agency—the show mostly pushes the reality of the pandemic to the background.
The women are approaching thirty and, of course, that means they’re freaking out about it. What’s a show about twentysomethings if thirty isn’t looming like a death sentence. In the first episode, they attend a 30 Under 30 event in which Izzy’s boyfriend Liam is being feted. There’s no social distancing. No masks. No discussion of vaccinations. Just a big roaring twenties party as if such a thing could be held in Los Angeles without any of those considerations.
Why acknowledge the way the pandemic affected these women at all if you then mostly ignore the realities of living with Covid? This is something a lot of media in the age of Covid has had to grapple with. Many shows just ignore the pandemic altogether. However, last year HBO’s “Betty” easily integrated the realities of going about your life during a pandemic without sacrificing any of what made that show special. Just a line of dialogue here. Someone wearing a mask there. The women on “Dollface” feel like they’d all have cute masks to match their outfits and yet never once do we see a mask after the opening montage.
Jules still works at Woöm, a women’s health and wellness brand in the vein of The Wing or GOOP. In the first season, a clear aim of the show was to showcase the importance of female friendships while also criticizing aspects of feminist based consumerism. It didn’t always succeed, but it at least felt like it was trying. In this season, much more of the show takes place at Woöm, moving it into workplace sitcom waters. Cliched coworkers are added, with Owen Thiele getting the worst of it as a Black queer Zoomer whose entire existence, it seems, is to live for drama, dole out sassy one-liners, and occasionally offer advice to Jules and Izzy.
The women sneer at a fellow college classmate who made a fortune selling motivational decals, yet they continue to work at a wellness company that makes a profit off of making women feel bad. As Jules becomes Celeste’s right hand woman at Woöm, Madison opens her own P.R. firm, and Stella makes plans to open a bar for women, the show doubles down on Girlboss feminism. Their lack of response to the realities of a world still deeply in a pandemic does nothing but amplify how vapid the supposed feminism of this show ever was.
Take the bar for women as an example. It implies that bars are inherently gendered, which in itself is a ridiculous notion. Try not to roll your eyes as Stella and her new business partner—and sometime lover—Liv (Lilly Singh) literally say they are smashing the patriarchy as they tear down a wall in the bar once owned by Liv’s father. What does a bar for women look like? The Gi-Spot, as they call it, has bowls of scrunchies and girl power neon signs so stereotypical they make Instagram hashtags seem deep. Other than these superficial nods at femininity, it’s just another overly manicured quote-unquote hip L.A. bar with overpriced drinks for women who do everything for the ‘gram. There doesn’t appear to be much thought put into how this systemically is any better a place for women to get plastered in than anywhere else.
Another completely botched attempt at feminism comes in the form of Madison’s one and only client, OnlyFans artist Lotus Dragon Bebe (Poppy Liu). Madison says she can clean up her image so that she can grow her personal brand and move into more lucrative parts of the entertainment industry. Insulted, Bebe gives an impassioned speech outlining how she has an art history degree from Brown and that she chooses how to employ her sexuality and center herself in her art. It’s supposed to be an empowering moment, but it effectively dismisses all the other women who use OnlyFans for an income who aren’t privileged, educated artists. It also doesn’t help that the character is sidelined for most of the season, except when Madison needs to use her as a resource in a later episode.
The four main actresses in “Dollface” are fun to watch, their chemistry undeniable. As are the surreal flights of fancy it employs to visualize Jules’ internal emotional turmoil; Beth Grant continues to be a hoot as her imaginary Cat Lady guide. But ultimately, it falters under the weight of its gauzy, glossy, insipid, surface-level understanding of feminism. If it would just stop trying so hard to prove that it’s not like other girls, “Dollface” could be a fun, somewhat escapist show about the emotional growth of four relatively privileged Los Angeleno women who find strength in each other. Instead, it’s emblematic of every aspect of faux feminist girl power that it thinks it’s different from. [D]
“Dollface” Season 2 debuts on Hulu on February 11.