Perhaps the saddest thing about the cancelation of “Girlboss” is the fact that we never got to see Sophia truly fail, and she only really grows as a person in small increments. In the show’s first and only season, she’s a selfish, self-centered, self-declared “b****” who’s constantly screwing things up. You frequently find yourself cringing as she stumbles into yet another easily-avoided mishap. But then again, if any one of us was to watch a TV show based on ourselves in our early 20s, we’d probably end up cringing three times as much. Let she who did not spend her early 20s making bad decisions and wallowing in navel-gazing cast the first stone.

If “Girlboss” has a counterpart here in the U.K., it would have to be the comedy series “Fresh Meat.” That show follows a group of housemates through three years at university, from the start of their degrees to the end (approximately from the ages of 18 to 22). And like Sophia, they are for the most part a truly terrible and embarrassing collection of human beings, making disastrous choices while voicing ignorant and high-minded opinions with a confidence that not one of them has earned. 

But that’s kind of what happens in your late teens and early 20s. There’s a popular narrative that life is a steady decline from the promise and potential of youth to the disappointment and unfulfilled dreams of later adult life … but ideally, you should be the worst possible version of your adult self at 18. Just as children go from the “terrible twos” of toddlerhood to (hopefully) learning empathy and self-control as they get older, so too can they continue to learn and improve after flying the nest and embarking on an independent life as young adults. And the road to self-improvement is paved with catastrophic mistakes.

The season 1 finale of “Girlboss” feels like a distinctly unearned and unsatisfying happy ending for Sophia. It’s like if “The Wolf of Wall Street” ended at the high point of Jordan Belfort’s career, before the FBI caught up to him, or if “Catch Me If You Can” had ended before Frank Abagnale was actually caught. That’s because “Girlboss” isn’t really a rags-to-riches success story; it’s an Icarus story about a meteoric rise followed by a downfall. We just never got to see the downfall.