Gwyneth Paltrow is all smiles as The Goop Lab takes to Netflix.
The Goop Lab with Gwyneth Paltrow (Netflix)
I thought I had the perfect angle: "Gwyneth Paltrow thinks we should all be taking magic mushrooms." I wanted so badly for that to be the headline – imagine the clicks! Please let this extremely wealthy lifestyle guru turn out to be even
half the kooky scammer she's made out to be any time her controversial wellness brand and website Goop hits the news.
This was before I watched the first episode of her new series, The Goop Lab, on Netflix, and realised how much of it I'd have to wilfully misinterpret in order to come to that conclusion. But maybe this is how it's always been when it comes to the popular pastime of Getting Mad at Gwyneth.
To be fair, neither Paltrow nor any of the people on her team who volunteered to try psychedelic-assisted therapy in this episode say we shouldn't be doing magic mushrooms. They're just very careful to avoid saying we should. And that if we do, it should be under such a specific set of conditions that we probably couldn't afford anyway.
The session the four Goop employees attend is held at an idyllic resort in Jamaica, guided by a laid-back facilitator called Gillian along with two intense "psychedelic elders": Richard, who has a suspiciously Kiwi-sounding accent and Sasha, who looks suspiciously like a Willem Defoe character in a Wes Anderson movie set at a psychedelic therapy retreat.