Gwyneth Paltrow’s Netflix Show Is Painful to Watch

But to watch The Goop Lab as a series, with its arcing assumptions about the limitations of medical science, is also to wonder where to locate the line between open-mindedness and gullibility. It is to wonder why Gwyneth Paltrow, celebrity and salesperson, should be trusted as an arbiter of health. To have a body is to live in a constant state of uncertainty. Goop transforms that anxiety into a sales pitch.

Read: When beauty is a troll

Goop also, at times, turns that anxiety into a joke. Its products get a lot of mileage from puns. The Goop Lab, its title suggestive of scientific rigor, makes fun of the brand’s reputation for the opposite. The poster for the show features Paltrow, clad in a pink dress, situated on a graphic that is unmistakably evocative of labia. (“REACH NEW DEPTHS,” the poster offers, winkily.) Late last week, Goop released a candle called This Smells Like My Vagina. Scented with geranium, bergamot, and cedar “to put us in mind of fantasy, seduction, and a sophisticated warmth,” the object cost $75, was the subject of much discussion, and sold out almost immediately.

The Goop Lab continues that lulzy approach—each episode begins with a title-card disclaimer that the show is “designed to entertain and inform” rather than offer medical advice—but combines the mirth with deep earnestness. That creates its own kind of chaos. What is the meaningful difference, legal niceties aside, between “information” and “advice”? When a medium talks about Shrek during a reading that claims to connect the living to the dead, how seriously are audiences supposed to take that? When Julianne Hough, a celebrity best known as a ballroom performer on Dancing With the Stars, joins the show to talk about a childhood trauma that she held in her foot, is that a testament to the body as a site of discovery, or to a kind of medical anarchy? “How Goop’s Haters Made Gwyneth Paltrow’s Company Worth $250 Million” is the title of The New York Times’ 2018 feature on the brand and its founder; the company’s Netflix spin-off, as well, has the potential to troll all the way to the bank.

The Goop Lab is streaming into a moment in America that finds Medicare for All under discussion and the Affordable Care Act under attack. It presents itself as airy infotainment even as many Americans are unable to access even the most basic forms of medical care. That makes the show deeply uncomfortable to watch. So does The Goop Lab’s just-asking-questions approach to health—its breezy mistrust of expertise itself. The show, like the online store from which it is spun, is perfectly calibrated to the post-fact cynicisms of 2020. Can you improve your immune system through breathing techniques? Can you lower your biological age, even if you cannot control your chronological one? Maybe. But it is telling that Goop, the lifestyle brand that treats health as a luxury good, is the one asking those questions.

Megan Garber is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers culture.