How Messy Millennial Woman became TV’s most tedious trope

There’s a scene in the opening episode of Everything I Know About Love – Dolly Alderton’s adaptation of her smash-hit 2018 memoir – in which 24-year-old protagonist Maggie is all dressed up with nowhere to go. Her flatmates are all out. Her current squeeze, a Blake Fielder-Civil lookalike she met on a train, isn’t picking up the phone – and when he eventually does, he rebuffs her. Maggie is insulted, bored and increasingly desperate. She lies on the living room floor. She has a solo pint or three in the local old-man pub. The sheer desolation of being alone on a Friday night in your mid-20s is perfectly evoked and intensely relatable.

But Maggie (Emma Appleton) is not a bog-standard Billy no-mates. She is Messy Millennial Woman. MMW doesn’t slope home and call