Gwyneth Paltrow Invites You Into Her … “Goop Lab“

Oh boy. In further proof we live in the darkest timeline, Gwyneth Paltrow and Netflix have unveiled the first trailer and poster for the goop lab (capital letters have unnecessary aggressive energy, don’t you know?) and given how infamous Gwyneth and Goop are for advocating putting thing like jade eggs in orifices where they don’t belong, the poster is pretty, uh….suggestive.

Will they have to pay the Georgia O’Keefe estate royalties for this? (That’s the cleanest joke I could come up with, guys, everything else was about Cats).

As if the poster wasn’t enticing enough, we also got the trailer for the docuseries, which goes deep inside the “lab” where Gwyneth and her cohorts (minions? prisoners? victim?) test and explore trends, treatments, and taboos that “scare” normal folk but could theoretically lead to a better, goopier life?

I hate to admit it, but while this looks insane, it also looks so very fascinating and watchable. I like that the women here, even Gwyneth, are expressing some actual skepticism of some of these topics, but also healthy curiosity. Do I personally think I’d benefit from an exorcism? Nope. Should you be looking to Gwyneth and her goop troop for health and wellness advice instead of actual doctors and experts? Absolutely not. Do I want to watch Instagram influencer-types subjected to that or plunged into ice-covered lakes or worse? Absolutely.

I’ll be watching this madness with a healthy degree of schadenfreude, for sure, but also some genuine fascination. It’s fun to see how far some people will go to, as Paltrow puts it, “milk the shit out of life” and see them look ridiculous doing it, but I’m also surprisingly fine with people doing whatever they have to in order to cope with our crazy, depressing world.

Let’s be clear – and I think the trailer is – goop is not science, even if they have a lab, and it’s part of a much bigger trend of making every niche, out-there, underground or alternative method of dealing with our bodies and lives into something marketable and suitable for Instagram. Netflix is meeting the demands of a market obsessed with this kind of snake oil in an artisanal package, and they are maybe poking fun at it as much as they are selling it, but who knows.

If nothing else this will give us meme and twitter fodder for the next several years.

The first season of the goop lab drops January 24 and I’m sure we and the old internet will have a lot to say about it when it does. And hey, if we don’t like it, it’s nothing that a little exorcism can’t fix, right?

(via: Elle, Image: Netflix)

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Jessica Mason

Jessica Mason (she/her) is a writer based in Portland, Oregon with a focus on fandom, queer representation, and amazing women in film and television. She's a trained lawyer and opera singer as well as a mom and author.

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