YMMV / The Bold Type

• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Alex, another writer at Scarlet. His popularity lead to getting more screen time and even his own B-plot story lines.
  • Jacqueline's assistant Andrew, for the fun commentary he adds to conversations and his upbeat and confident personality. Fans enjoy his drag queen persona Jacqueline Carmichael too.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: In canon, Jane ends up with Scott and has a relationship with Ryan. However, most fans of the show ship her with her boss and mentor, Jacqueline, despite Jacqueline being married to Ian Carlyle. This is mainly due to the chemistry between the actresses, Katie Stevens and Melora Hardin, as well as the fact that they make great Ship Mates with the popular Official Couple of Kat/Adena.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Season 4 was billed as the season where Jane "levels up" and begins on her path to becoming the new Editor-in-Chief of Scarlet. Most of the discussion of the season, however, centered around Kat's arc, in which she exposes the fact that Scarlet is being used to fund right-wing causes, is fired and blackballed from other jobs in her field for this exposure, and ends up having to endure lectures from a condescending Gay Conservative in order to keep her new job as a bartender. She also inexplicably ends up in a relationship with said gay conservative, despite the relationship alienating her friends and threatening her attempts to get a new podcast off the ground. Fans hated the storyline with a fiery passion, and then Aisha Dee came forward and confessed at length that she hated it, too, and that the storyline was only the latest instance of the showrunners treating her like crap. That this all happened amid real-life discussions about racism as well as discussions about the treatment of black actors in media did not help things.
• Retroactive Recognition: Amrit Kaur would later become more prominent as Bela Malhotra in The Sex Lives of College Girls.
• Sophomore Slump: After a widely loved season one, season two is a lot more polarizing, with messier writing. In particular, the majority of Jane's conflicts with other characters stemming from various personal traumas that were never brought up before; the handling of Kat and Adena's relationship and breakup; and characters not getting much meaningful screentime were criticized.
• The Scrappy: Cleo. Any chance of her being liked ended when she was against a magazine cover promoting body positivity.
• Squick: In-universe as, when Sutton moves out, she and Jane realize they've accidentally been using each other's vibrators for some time.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Neither Sutton nor Richard end up looking good when their marriage dissolves at the end of season 4. On the one hand, Richard looks like an asshole for pushing Sutton to try for another baby so soon after her miscarriage, especially because his motives for wanting to be a dad are incredibly self-serving (wanting to "prove" that he can be a good dad despite having an abusive father.) On the other hand, Sutton looks like an asshole for convincing Richard to freeze his sperm and agree to a five-year pause on pursuing parenthood, despite never intending to go through with a pregnancy, and knowing that at Richard's age, a five-year wait would mean he'd be a dad in his fifties.
• WTH, Costuming Department?: At one point, Jane is seen in an absolutely hideous blue shirt. The top of it looks relatively normal, but the middle is a ruffled, crisscrossed monstrosity that ends in more ruffles. And it's a crop top, which might look good if not for the rest.