The Bold Type Cast Members and EP on Season 4’s Most Buzzed-About Moments and What’s Still to Come | ATX Television Festival
The back half of The Bold Type Season 4 returned on June 11.
Ahead of the midseason premiere, on June 6, 2020, ATX Television Festival’s virtual event, “ATX TV…From the Couch,” hosted a live panel with the cast and showrunner to preview what’s to come and discuss some of the most buzzed-about moments of Season 4 so far — like that elaborate bachelorette party dance routine.
Moderated by Samantha Highfill of Entertainment Weekly, the four panelists were showrunner/executive producer Wendy Straker-Hauser and the three main cast members: Katie Stevens (Jane), Aisha Dee (Kat), and Meghann Fahy (Sutton).
The panel began with an extended preview of the new season — the first eight minutes of The Bold Type Season 4B premiere, “Leveling Up.”
Importantly, because the panel was recorded live rather than pre-recorded, Aisha Dee started off by acknowledging the current moment, referencing the country’s civil unrest and nationwide Black Lives Matter protests. She amplified Black voices people should be following on Twitter to educate themselves, including public historian Blair Imani.
Then, the panel launched into a discussion of the 8-minute sneak peek we’d just seen, as well as themes viewers can expect to see in the remainder of Season 4B. Here are five things we learned from the panel.
1. Jane’s mastectomy storyline will be a major part of the season, despite the brevity of the recovery sequence montage.
Katie Stevens, who played Jane, is a major part of the extended preview. The clip includes a montage that flashes forward through the three-month recovery period after Jane’s surgery.
Naturally, Jane’s BFFs Sutton and Kat are there to help support her in the aftermath of her surgery. The montage wraps with Jane finally heading back to work, where she’s set to launch the magazine’s first-ever vertical.
Long-time viewers of the series know that the seeds for this storyline were planted way back in the first season, when Jane, who lost her mother to breast cancer, tested positive for the BRCA gene. Much of the power of this new storyline comes from how long it’s been in development, and how sensitively and carefully it’s handled.
Straker-Hauser explained why it’s perfectly in character for Jane to have chosen to undergo a preventative double mastectomy.
“When we’re grappling with what our characters should do, we always look at our characters themselves and ask ourselves ‘What would Jane do?'” Straker-Hauser said. “Jane is a planner, Jane is organized, Jane likes to check the boxes.”
“And having those two emotionally heavyweights that are her breasts in this scenario hanging over her head, like is this a ticking time bomb,” she continued. “It felt like the best decision for Jane at that moment, so she could shed the fear of ‘what if.'”
Of the decision to condense Jane’s recovery period into a relatively short montage sequence, the showrunner explained that the writers wanted to “do it right,” with expert input and guidance, but also “at the same time not live in the pain of the recovery process, which is not so TV and light.”
Of course, that doesn’t mean that the show won’t be reckoning with the aftermath of Jane’s surgery for the rest of the season.
“What we’ll explore is what happens when your physical scars have healed and your emotional scars have not and how do you move forward through the world, especially with Ryan not there,” Straker-Hauser said, referencing Jane’s breakup with Ryan (aka Pinstripe) at the end of Season 4A.
Stevens said she has a personal connection to Jane’s storyline — her husband’s mother died of breast cancer. This made it particularly important to her that the show (and she as an actress) do its best to make it “the most possible authentic story,” noting that the writers brought doctors on set to walk them through what the recovery process would actually be like.
2. Sutton struggles with having it all.
Over the course of the first three and a half seasons of the show, Sutton has had arguably the most “successful” arc: At the end of Season 4A, she married Richard, her long-time love, and she finally gets the stylist job she’s wanted from the very beginning.
So it should be smooth sailing from here on out for Sutton, right? Well, not exactly.
“Something Sutton learns is that it never really gets easy to have it all,” Fahy said. “We’re always talking on the show about having it all and that it’s possible — and it is! — and I think it’s cool that we’re showing her have it all, but we’re also seeing her struggle with how to make it all work.”
Fahy said the mutual support that’s always been present between her and Richard continues. “But it’s not without its challenges. It gets complicated with them for sure,” Fahy said.
3. Kat reckons with her privilege.
At the end of Season 4A, Kat lost her job at Scarlett. For Kat, who has been the most well-off from the beginning, losing her job — and really, a part of her identity — turns her world upside down.
“In the very beginning, Kat was the one who came from the most socioeconomic privilege. There is something very interesting about watching Kat, for the first time, be the one who’s not in the highest paid job, the one who’s not the most successful,” Straker-Hauser said of Kat’s journey from the beginning of the series.
“She left Scarlett because she did something incredibly brave and very inspiring but for the first time in the whole series we’re going to see her struggle financially in a way she’s never had to — at a time when Sutton is rising and Jane is rising, so that is a really fun dynamic to play,” she continued.
Dee agreed that it was “cool to see Kat reckon with her privilege for the first time ever.”
“I think [that’s] especially relevant right now, given that we’re all examining our privilege. Whether it’s the fact that we are able-bodied, or we’re cis and we don’t know what the trans experience is like,” Dee said. “For Kat, she’s lived with this financial safety net her entire life, and for the first time that’s stripped away […] She has to go and re-find herself.”
4. The story behind the dance routine at Sutton’s bachelorette party.
Not everyone was equally enthused about the big dance number on The Bold Type Season 4 Episode 9, “5, 6, 7, 8.”
Dee said that the actresses were begging for a proper dance routine for four seasons. Fahy, on the other hand, quickly disagreed, saying she cried throughout an entire rehearsal one time because she was so embarrassed about how bad she was.
“Learning choreography is actually my nightmare,” Fahy said.
Stevens explained that the reason they had the dance number to begin with was because of a cut scene from an earlier season.
“The girls are all kind of down in the dumps and we did a choreographed dance. It was something that the girls must have made up one time and they just do it when they’re doing. So it was us dancing to Spice Girls,” Stevens said of the unaired scene. “Then everyone said it didn’t really make sense, so it didn’t get to air, and we were devastated. So I think they were throwing us a bone by being like ‘OK we want you to have the fun, so here’s where it’s going to come in.”
“Unfortunately, the Spice Girls song is very expensive. So next time you’re going to do an amazing impromptu, do it to something — do it to one of [Stevens’ husband, singer-songwriter] Paul [DiGiovanni]’s songs, or one of your own songs,” Straker-Hauser joked.
5. There’s a mystery guest star we may or may not get to see.
The coronavirus pandemic disrupted the production schedules of series across all networks. The Bold Type was one of the shows affected — and apparently, it might mean we don’t get to see one of the show’s best guest spots.
When asked about a guest star who has shocked them the most or gotten them excited, all three women agreed that it was an unnamed guest actor from a future episode.
“I feel like we can’t say [who we were most excited about guest starring] because it’s an episode that isn’t going to air,” Fahy said. “I was about to say that as well,” the showrunner agreed.
Stevens was in favor of revealing the identity of the hyped-up guest star. “I feel like, who knows what’s going to happen? We all hope we get another season, and then maybe those episodes will air. But I don’t think it hinders anything to say it,” Stevens said.
In the end, the actors and showrunners opted not to reveal the identity of the upcoming guest star. But Straker-Hauser did give a little tease about the appearance and how it came to be.
“We have someone really fun and charismatic and funny who is just the perfect addition to these girls. We did shoot his scenes. It did come after a Celebrity Family Feud PR experience where, right off the bat, this person said I want to be on the show,” Straker-Hauser said.
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The Bold Type Season 4 airs Thursdays at 10/9c on Freeform.
Check out all of our coverage of the ATX Television Festival’s virtual event right here.
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Caralynn Lippo
Caralynn is a freelance writer and editor, but most importantly, she is a diehard TV addict. A few of her current favorites are Mr. Robot, You're the Worst, iZombie, and The Vampire Diaries. She also writes about TV for Romper, The TV Junkies, and TV Fanatic.