Phoebe Robinson is living her 'Black girl Carrie Bradshaw fantasy' in Everything's Trash

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In Phoebe Robinson's version of Sex and the City, the rom-com heroine isn't living a life of luxury with a closet full of expensive shoes. Her thirty-something protagonist may be buying expensive dresses, but she's wearing them with the tags still on and then returning them the next day, because she's living a realistic penny-pinching New York City experience in Everything's Trash.

The new Freeform comedy, based on her collection of essays, Everything's Trash, But It's Okay, is written and executive produced by Robinson, who also stars as Phoebe, an outspoken podcast host making her professional mark while living a broke and delightfully messy life in Brooklyn while her "perfect" older brother launches a political campaign, forcing her to start her adulting journey. "I feel like I'm living my Black girl Carrie Bradshaw fantasy and I am here for it," Robinson tells EW. "Also I wear a couple berets like Emily in Paris, so we doing the whole thing."

Robinson was excited to sprinkle in some rom-com elements to the show because Sex and the City is one of her all-time favorite series. "I really want my character to have fun with that, to be playful and be carefree like Carrie," she says. "I think we're in a great time of television, especially with female women of color who are protagonists, that they can sort of be any way that they want to be. I really just wanted to lean into how I'm not trying to represent the Black community, I'm just representing my experience and the experience of the writers in the writers' room."

It's been almost a three-year long journey to bring Everything's Trash to TV, but Robinson feels it couldn't have come at a better time. "I think people will really like it because it's funny and it has a lot of heart," she says. "And right now, everything is so heavy. There's a lot of true crime, heavy, serialized, hour-long dramas. It's like, enough with the curly wigs and white women getting murdered. We don't need it. I think it's good to laugh during the summer and feel good."

Robinson had a lot of options of which essay to focus on when adapting her book for the small screen, but showrunner Jonathan Groff was really excited about the one in which she detailed her money journey. "It's about how I was really broke for a long time," she says. "I think some people were surprised by that, because they were like, 'You had the Queens podcast, it premiered at No. 1 around the world on the iTunes charts.' I'm like, 'Yeah, but I can barely pay my rent.' It's a great reminder that on the outside, things may look one way, but the inside, you're struggling to make it in New York."

That's why she decided to make the main character of the show based on herself, only slightly fictionalized — and with her own name. "TV Phoebe is me in my early thirties, when I was bopping around the city, podcasting, doing standup, eating dollar pizza, maybe not dating the best kind of people to date," she says. "It's sort of her maturation — but I think TV Phoebe is probably a little more selfish than I am IRL. Or at least, I hope. So we definitely made room for fictionalizing stuff, but the being broke [is] very real because I was broke for probably a full decade in New York. That's really, really true."

That's where the realistic version of Carrie Bradshaw comes into play. "We have an episode where my character is doing a photo shoot and she's broke, she doesn't really have money, so she's like, 'I'm going to get this dress, I'm going to wear it and I'm going to return it,'" Robinson says. "I used to wear returned clothes all the time — I know that's frowned upon, but when you don't have money and you have to go to these events and no one is styling you, you're just like, 'I'm going to charge this $300 dress on my credit card and hopes that no one spills anything on it, that I can return it the next day.'"

Robinson also hopes that Everything's Trash helps other people understand that all experiences are valid, no matter how different it may look. "Not only am I showing what it's like to be bopping around the city trying to make it, but also just because your life doesn't look like someone else's, that may be your sibling, that may be your friends, your parents, it doesn't mean that your life isn't good, or you're not doing the 'right' things," she says. "I really wanted to be like, this is what one way of growing up can look like. You can still be true to yourself and still have that spark and fire within you, have that uniqueness and quirkiness. You don't have to give that up just because you're getting older and hopefully making wiser choices."

Everything's Trash premieres Wednesday, July 13, at 10 p.m. on Freeform.

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