This is the week of season finales! But a show that is still in the beginning phases of proving itself is Lena Dunham’s HBO series, GIRLS. Created, written, directed, and starred in by Dunham herself, produced by Judd Apatow, and features familiar actors from Dunham and Apatow’s previous projects (Jemima Kirke from Tiny Furniture, Becky Ann Baker from Freaks and Geeks), hilarious comedy personalities (Jorma Taccone from Lonely Island, Andrew Rannells from The Book of Mormon) and new, but promising faces (Adam Driver, Allison Williams).
If you haven’t already gotten on the GIRLS bandwagon, then essentially it is a show about four girls in their 20′s in New york figuring out adult life post graduation. The story starts with the main character, Hanna Horvath (Dunham) an aspiring writer, being cut off from her parents forcing her to get a job in a time when jobs are hard to come by.
Before the show premiered it was predicted by some to be the new Sex And The City but with younger women. I found that prediction to be bullshit. In my opinion, GIRLS is a realistic approach to what it is like to be female, or even young, these days. There is so much pressure to perform and so little guarantee that anything will come from it.
Being an arts student myself, slowly approaching the day where I will be cut loose into the wilderness of ‘adulthood’ and serious job-search, I feel like the thematic material in the series is very relatable. But my favourite truth in GIRLS is the different types of unrequited relationships and how young people today desperately cling to them even if they are making them miserable.
There has been a lot of criticism directed towards the show once it started airing, but I’m not going to get into it now. But if you are interested to hear more about that, then you can listen to this great interview with Lena Dunham on NPR where she talks about her show and the audience’s reactions.
Mostly, I’m interested in the reactions of my immediate circle. My housemates, like me, love the show. We laugh, cringe, and yell “Oh no he didn’t!” while wagging our fingers in the air.
But yesterday I spoke to my brother and he wasn’t too impressed. He made it clear to me that he does, indeed, love Lena Dunham and all of her genius wit. He praises Dunham’s feature film Tiny Furniture, and was the one who got me on to her work in the first place, but GIRLS just didn’t float his boat.
He said it was mainly due to the characters being too special. As in, all of the characters.
“It’s like if the characters in Community were all like Abed” he said.
I get that, you need some plain ones to really enhance the crazy ones. But then again, we live in an era of hipters and everyone is trying to out-special everyone, therefore the show is staying true to its realistic form.
* Another thing that bothered him about the show was, weirdly, Lena Dunham herself. He didn’t like her physically as the main character. As in, he doesn’t like her face. He said that the writing is brilliant but that he could have listened to the dialogue without having to actually watch, it is a “Butterfaced show” (we agreed that this would be a collaborative quote, a result from Urbye banter).
This is fine, because it was meant to evoke such reactions. Hanna Horvath is not a picture-perfect, airbrushed model typed girl, because you know what? – Most of us aren’t. I think it is really brave of Dunham to go to such lengths of showing her ’unperfect’, naked body on television, and I think it is a step towards changing negative attitudes in viewing the female body. SO BRAVO!
* I misunderstood some of my brother’s criticism, so here is what he wrote back to me (but I still think my points stand, therefore I didn’t edit much out of my original paragraph)
“I have been taken out of context, to an extent. I never said I didn’t like Lena Dunhams face or naked body. And I never would expect them to use an air brushed model or any such thing for a show like this. I also understand why she would want to be the “protagonist” in her show because who better to speak the words of a show than the writer her self. BUT I just feel like if she wasn’t the”protagonist” that it wouldn’t hurt the show at all. There are a bunch of funny and talented 20 something year old girls out there who could portray Lena very well.”
The show is currently on its 4th episode of the 1st season, and I’m definitely praying for a second season because this stuff is gold. I’m calling it, GIRLS for most influential show of 2012 (if there are any categories like that at the Emmys).
