If you haven’t watched “Dollface” yet, Hulu’s latest take on deciphering millennial women, you should brace yourself for a round of entertainment with a healthy serving of forceful stereotypes. The bones of the show are promising. Jules (Kat Dennings) struggles to re-integrate herself with her abandoned social life and the friends she left behind after a devastating breakup.
The show pulls you in quickly with its weird, bordering on cliche and unwelcome, quirks. Jules gets dropped off at the bus station by her former beau when a bus full of sobbing women pulls up. The cliche breakup bus doesn’t seem like enough, though, so it’s driven by a literal cat lady- a lady with a CGI cat head. Years of living with her boyfriend, Jeremy, lands her on a one-way trip to the terminal of lonely girls waiting to get picked up by their long-lost girlfriends. Unlike the other girls from the bus, Jules has no one to pick her up. She realizes she needs to reconnect with her friends ASAP.
A questionable reality sequence ensues, with Jules struggling to integrate into the lives of her former girlfriends Madison (Brenda Song) and Stella (Shay Mitchell). Madison is the type A workaholic millennial woman who’s got it together, while Stella is the bohemian It Girl living on family money? And, of course, there’s the wildly insecure friend Izzy (Esther Povitsky) whose neurotic obsession with acceptance and coolness makes her the perfect counterpart to Stella. Oh, and they all work at Woom, a women’s lifestyle start-up obsessed with women’s wellness and possibly funded by Kourtney Kardashian.
If that’s not enough, brunch is holy with the girls, and the meals take place in a church. The only thing the show’s caricature portrayal of millennial women didn’t cover is HOW THE HELL CAN THEY AFFORD ANYTHING? Jules lives by herself? Get out of here! While the show creator is a recent grad of the University of Southern California, Jordan Weiss, it almost smells like a disgruntled grandpa gave her character development tips.
Instead of giving hints of female solidarity with witty humor, the show relies on getting by with stereotypes. And yes, it makes entertaining TV for a bit, until you reach the end and realize it’s just a show trash-talking a generation for the sake of viewership. All we’re left with is Shay Mitchell’s amazing wardrobe that we probably can’t afford anyway because we work regular jobs while paying off student loans and barely able to cover the bills.
