‘The Bold Type’ is perhaps the most fun you’ll have watching television—if you a) enjoy hashtagging and b) want to laugh until you have a hernia—you will love this show.

The Show: The Bold Type

The Network: Freeform

The Genre: Comedy/Drama

The Challenge: Give a show four episodes with which to draw you in, impress you, challenge you, make you feel something deeply. Four episodes for the chance to find out if you care what happens to the characters you’re watching enough to become invested in the story. If after all that, it does none of those things for you? Then no biggie. You gave it a good shot and you can move on. But if you love it, you’ll be glad you stuck around.

The Premise: Inspired pretty much by Cosmopolitan magazine, ‘The Bold Type‘ centres around three, bull-headed girls, employees of Scarlet magazine, fighting their ways through their messy twenties. First up is young Jane Sloan (Katie Stevens), an up-and-coming writer who’s navigating her way through failure and success. Secondly, there’s the best assistant in New York City—Sutton (Meghann Fahy). Lastly, Aussie rising star Aisha Dee is the most confident social media director around as Kat Edison. Together, they wage the battle that is their lives, mentored by Melora Hardin’s Jacqueline. ‘The Bold Type’ also stars Sam Page, Matt Ward, Nikohl Boosheri and Stephen Conrad Moore.

Owning female sexuality is always important to society, and ‘The Bold Type’ is stepping up to the plate. Big time. First stop: smashing over-used tropes.

Wrapped in make-up, weird sex positions, beauty, fashion, heels on a treadmill—’The Bold Type’ is your newest, most fun show. It’s unabashedly sexy, empowering and feel-good. The sound-track is boppy—in fact, the entire soundtrack is very Walking on Sunshine-esque. And it’s so wonderfully glorious to watch the core three girls (Sutton, Jane and Kat) bounce through life.

The premise of the season seems summed up in the premiere episode by two distinct scenes. Firstly, there’s Jacqueline’s powerful speech at the fictional magazine’s gala. She tells her girls, quoting Jane’s application, to go live their twenties. Be messy; have sex; make mistakes; fail; conquer. To have a life. Next is Boosheri’s Adena, who’s quite possibly the season’s heart-throb judging by Twitter (it’s a tug-of-war between her and Dee). As a photographer, Adena completely misjudges Kat and ‘Scarlet’ magazine’s image by refusing to associate her work with something she sees as non-feminist. Upon Kat’s relentlessness, she changes her mind.

It’s these quick switches that are the ultimate charm of the show. Within the first four episodes, the show easily tackles racial profiling, racial slurs, LGBTQ representation, POC representation, female representation—and so much more. The girls navigate shenanigans with Yoni eggs, the Lesbian/Muslim rathole (infamous) and in particular, Sutton’s journey to becoming queen of the world is as inspiring as you’ll get. And it’s not encased in some pretentious bubble. It’s sheer fun, because not every show needs Westeros to make it work. Rather, it’s the relationships and the genuine feeling of integrity and no-compromise that makes this click. And the core three. They could not have picked a better trio.

That’s a fact.

We love romances and sub-plots—but the centric story revolves around three women who are always supportive, realistically falling out—and they make the biggest flaws and they are the strongest.

To support the above statement of fact—and it’s a fact—’The Bold Type’ creators could not have picked a better trio. Stevens brings a naive, somewhat otherworldly holed-up brain of Jane Sloan. Aisha Dee’s Kat is refreshingly confident. Honest, cutting and smooth, Kat is climbing high up the ladder of Scarlet magazine. But in contrast to this, she’s arguably the most vulnerable too—after all, the higher the climb, the bigger the fall. And the fear Dee shoves into Kat’s speech at the end of episode four to Adena shows us exactly why she’s nominated for that Teen Choice Award.

Lastly, we have Sutton. Sutton’s the kind of best friend you want to give you a pep-talk, cuddle and aspire to be as well. Her journey through the first four episodes has probably been the most tumultuous. She’s fallen behind her friends as they’ve conquered Scarlet magazine. But damn if she doesn’t work her ass off. And we have a feeling that Sutton’s climb to sure success, with many mistakes along the way, will inspire many. Fahy’s bubbly display of optimism as well as openness as she wears her heart on her sleeve makes it vastly impossible to say which one of the girls clambers on top as our favourite.

Yet no matter what—arguments, orgasm revelations, job blow-offs, sexual identity issues—the girls are first and foremost supportive of each other. There is a constant on this dynamic show—and that’s their stubbornly loving friendship. It’s about time women stopped cutting each other down on television—and started boosting each other up.

And that’s why you should probably tune into ‘The Bold Type’. Because what’s better? Having one favourite character, or having an entire cast of them? (We bet it’s the latter).

‘The Bold Type’ is relevant, sexy, raw and honest. All of these characters fall from huge heights, CEO Jacqueline walks on a treadmill in four-inch heels(!) and we’re watching as these messy twenty-somethings navigate the adventure of their lives. Hashtag.

Melora Hardin: ‘Transparent’ really taught me that it’s really important to be good entertainment, no doubt, but it’s even more wonderful to be great entertainment that’s doing good.

With all the difficult obstacles the girls encounter and wriggle through, nursing broken hearts and fall-outs and tears and squealing and jumping—they stick together. They fall, and they support each other. And they win, and they support each other.

One of the standout performances is easily Melora Hardin’s performance as Jacqueline, the CEO of Scarlet magazine. With her sassy entrance in those leather pants and stilettos, it would be so easy to make Jacqueline the bitchy boss everyone’s scared of. In film depictions we’ve seen so many of these types of characters. And the reason why Hardin’s character and depiction is so refreshing is because she’s the kind of boss you really want to have. She’s hard-ass, strict and she cares. These girls—she nurtures them, in the best, structured way possible. She isn’t going to be from a generation who’ll knock the younger down—she’s going to make queens of kitchen maids.

It’s easy to ignore the males in this review but we shouldn’t. Sam Page’s Richard stands out in particular when he supports Sutton as she pursues her dream. With Richard’s executive position in the magazine, she could easily depend on him for her own goals. But she doesn’t. And Richard doesn’t ask her to—he tells her to get it and then call him. When we say the show’s feminist, we don’t mean it’s just the women supporting each other. The males do too and vice-versa.

Sounds a bit like equality, huh?

Final Verdict: ‘The Bold Type’ leapt at us with such surprise and it has been the funniest surprise we’ve seen in a while. It’s emotional, perfectly-casted, perfectly-acted and like the women on the show, so much more than we think we’ve seen.

Created by Sarah Watson, ‘The Bold Type’ is a fresh, grin-inducing joyride of a show. It’s unashamedly fun, and if it had a voice, it’d probably say to you “I don’t care what you think about me”. The trio are tight-knit. There’s an oncoming storm of #Kadena phenomenon that you’d better brace yourself for and just embrace the powerful tornado called ‘representation’. It’s not without its flaws and nor is it without its cheesy, over-the-top soapy moments. But damn, it’s about time we started seeing shows like this.

No-nonsense, full foot in the pedal, gassing it down the fun lane. Syfy’s recent outings of ‘The Magicians’, ‘Killjoys’, ‘Wynonna Earp’, and ‘Dark Matter’ are exemplary. Freeform’s fighting back with ‘Stitchers’ and now ‘The Bold Type’. And when this show undoubtedly amasses a powerful fanbase because, well, it really deserves one, the whole world will be encapsulated. We’ve seen so many small shows like this—the Little Show That Might—that eventually do. And ‘The Bold Type’ is surely one of those shows that holds its own. If anything, it almost makes ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ seem a bit like ‘The Devil Wears H&M’.

(Not that there’s anything wrong with H&M).

Catch THE BOLD TYPE on Freeform, Tuesdays 9/8c.