I researched Lynn Sternberg  who wrote episode 9 of The Bold Type. By research I mean that I did a light Google search, clicked on her Twitter profile, and skimmed through her posts. For a writer, she doesn’t write many of her own tweets; the majority of her posts are retweets, and many of  her retweets are political in nature which is unsurprising in light of episode 9’s content. Excluding episode 1, The Bold Type always begins with a voiceover that  briefly highlights past events of previous episodes and introduces the main characters, Sutton, Kat and Jane. The voiceover is done by a female whose accent is hard to place. It doesn’t add anything to the story, but I have a feeling it was meant to sound powerful and refined. The voiceover’s only purpose is the introduction in the beginning, so its only value is in setting the tone for the episode, but it’s hardly memorable. What is memorable is the dialogue of The Bold Type; it feels so real and organic. I can see my friends and I having the same conversations, well maybe not the exact same conversations, but the feeling is the same. There is such an authenticity to the dialogue in every episode, and this episode is no different. Where this episode does stand out though is in its external references to the current political climate. With witty comments slipped in such as describing a glimpse of Trump as “a small orange blur” and Jacqueline referring to Trump as “Number 45”, Sternberg sure had her fun expressing her political beliefs.

I thought I might put a picture of Trump here, but I though I’d spare us all that pain, and just add a picture of an orange cat to represent “a small orange blur”.

In addition to subtle and not so subtle jokes, the episode explicitly showcased protests against President Trump. As another angle, this episode also took a softer more personal tone with Adena’s deportation. Of course, I do not know what it feels like to be deported, but the episode did its best in detailing certain aspects of deportation: the uncertainty, the powerlessness, the loss.

This is from when Adena calls Kat to tell her she’s being deported. It’s so sad when people who have nothing to apologize for feel like they need to apologize.

Balancing both the joking element along with seriousness is really a smart way to go about an issue such as this. Even in the midst of Adena’s hardship, a bit of humor surfaced when Kat called the Immigrants’ Rights Hotline and it put her on hold saying “our current volume is extremely high” which is just a humorous way to allude to the massive mistreatment of immigrants in the United States. Another bit of writing with a deeper meaning is when one of the characters says “the president has things totally screwed up out here” in reference to New York City traffic being completely gridlocked due to the president’s visit to the city. I have a deep suspicion that this statement was not only a reaction to some extra traffic in New York City but also to the president’s actions in the United States in general because “the president has things totally screwed up out here” too.