Girls
A lot of people don't like Girls--maybe they're jealous of the success Dunham has at such a young age. While I was kind of meh about her film, Tiny Furniture, I'm on board with this series (I just finished season 1), which shows that women, even pretty ones, are just as fucked up as men are.
Dunham has stated she did not create the show as a counterpoint to Sex and the City, which was unrealistic, but in the pilot the most Sex in the City character, Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) shows her arriving cousin Jessa (Jemima Kirke) the poster for the show on the wall. Jessa says she's never seen it, but Shoshanna engages in the "which one am I?" game. Shoshanna is the least seen of the four characters--she's kind of the link to shows like Sex in the City, though we quickly learn that she is a virgin.
The show is about Hannah (Dunham), who in the pilot gets cut off from her parents. I guess there's a breed of person in New York (Brooklyn, specifically) who kind of moseys through their youth, getting internships and attending parties while on their parent's dime. I don't know anything about that, but it crushes Hannah, who must get a job. She rooms with Marnie (Alllison Williams), who has the perfect boyfriend but longs for him to treat her badly, which I found completely authentic.
Hannah doesn't have a boyfriend, but she has a booty call, a strange guy called Adam who never wears a shirt and is frequently found with power tools. He's one of those guys who has learned sex from porn. By the end of the show, after Hannah has pursued him, he becomes her boyfriend, but then she backs off. This is also authentic.
What may gall some people is how pathetic Hannah is. She really loathes herself, has no self-confidence, and is 13 pounds overweight, which she says has haunted her all her life. She also dated an obviously gay guy in college but didn't know it. In some ways she's a version of Tina Fey's Liz Lemon, a woman with a great career who can barely function in a social situation (though Hannah doesn't even have a career). Hannah is so full of neuroses that you might want to slap her. There's a really wrenching scene in the penultimate episode in which she is going to a reading, invited by her college professor, and she plans on reading one of her essays about a guy she dated who was a hoarder. But a guy she hardly knows tells her that's trivial, so she writes a story on the subway that doesn't go over well. This is the character--a desperately needy person who is too easily influenced by anyone she meets.
While Hannah dominates the show, my favorite character (and probably that of most men) is Jessa, the world traveler who acts like she doesn't seem to give a fuck, though she does. She gets a job as a babysitter and makes a fool out of the dad, who even resorts to come to one of those warehouse parties to see her, and brings a bottle of wine. She wants to slide through life, but life has other ideas. At the beginning of the show she is pregnant and backs out of an abortion, but nothing is said about that for the rest of the season. In the last episode she does something completely out of character, but since her capriciousness is part of her character, it works.
No matter what this says about today's young women, I just found it funny. The writing is almost Woody Allen worthy. I don't remember a lot of the lines verbatim, but I do remember Jessa telling Ray (Adam Karpovsky) to keep an eye on Shoshanna after she's accidentally smoked crack: "Don't let her jump off a roof, or get finger-banged by a beat-boxer." The dialogue is just great, but seems natural.
Girls is also incredibly frank about sex. There's one scene in which Adam masturbates, his thing just out of frame, while Hannah humiliates him. Dunham is naked an awful lot (none of the other actresses expose much), which may be her way of taking one for the team or making a point that chubby women can have beautiful bodies, too. I do wish Williams (daughter of NBC anchorman Brian) and Kirke would join the party, though.
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