Girls and the (lost?) art of anti-aspirational TV
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
There are bars where you will never drink again, and friends you just won't talk to.
TV loves gorgeous gangs of metropolitan twentysomethings, so many witty-hot found families sizzling with stylish romantic possibility. See How I Met Your Father, barf. So the best thing about Girls was all the acid in its veins. The HBO comedy turns ten years old today, and it was not only the story of four women growing to hate each other. There were fun parts, and sad parts, maybe two seasons you could skip, a few episodes everyone must see fifty times. But creator Lena Dunham often wrote this Brooklyn reverie with a poison pen. "I'm so f---ing sick of all of you!" Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) tells her pals. That line comes not even halfway through the series. Things trended down.
What was Girls? A bit like asking: When was Williamsburg? You had to be there, and maybe none of us should have been.
The anniversary has brought out profound defenses, but I don't think the show has ever had a worse reputation than right now. Not because suddenly people don't like it. It was always hated — so much knee-jerk distaste and in-depth political takedown feeding right off the counterbalancing voice-of-a-generation praise. (Remember: A decade ago, the average TV viewer still had constant opinions about shows they barely cared about.) Now the whole thing just feels absent. Its stars have faded, with a single exception whose centaur masculinity proves the rule. (The point of Girls was never inventing Darth Vader's grandson.) The show's influence, though profound, is generally disavowed. The head of programming at HBO has specifically said he is not discussing a revival, and the head of programming at HBO is a man who seems to discuss seven revivals before breakfast.
Mark Schafer/HBO
A shame, because Girls could be unbelievably awesome. In the third episode, "All Adventurous Women Do," Hannah (Dunham) finds out she has HPV. It sends her on a journey: Old boyfriend, meaningful tweet, Robyn. But before that happens, Hannah just hangs out with Adam (Adam Driver), the shirtless panther she sweetly screws. They lounge around in the near-buff, jokily tickling each other's tummy skin. The apartment looks futon-sized. They're hot for each other and don't really know each other. Their current collective income is negative cents. She talks in circles, he speaks with ellipses. She's a, like, essayist. He's a, like, artist.
It's starting to sound like I am describing annoying humans, but both performances are extraordinary, so funny and so offbeat. The dialogue doesn't yet sound like banter. "Will you still have sex with me?" Hannah asks, after the HPV news. "When it's appropriate, sure," Adam says. A wonderful line, and I can never tell if he's being cruel or kind — if the message is "I have to think about it" or "Of course, duh!"
Dunham wrote and directed the first three episodes. There's an argument to be made that Girls was never better, or more completely itself. "All Adventurous Women Do" ends when Hannah tells Marnie (Allison Williams) she has HPV, and they dance together to "Dancing On My Own." Perfection!!!!!
By the time the gang goes to Bushwick later in season 1, you sense a writing staff approximating autobiographical youthness. I remember that party episode being pretty buzzy— Shoshanna smokes crack! — but it's heinous on rewatch. The ex-and-future boyfriends in a poppy punk band, the crusty punks with an axe to grind, the suggestion by Jessa (Jemima Kirke) that the club will be sick because "all of Brooklyn and two-thirds of Manhattan will be here": This is all stuff you could get from any hipster show scripted by people who know hipsters from Sunday Styles.
Lack of authenticity was one of the nicer things you could say about Girls. But the main characters were resonantly inauthentic. Hannah was the de facto hero who Dunham could play as a willful goof. She was a mess whose self-awareness of her messiness only made her messier. (Dunham kept writing scenes where people justifiably accused Hannah of rank narcissism). A lesser show would've cast Hannah as an Ernie, with Marnie as the type-A Bert. But the oddest thing about this couple was how Marnie turned powers-of-ten more self-destructive. She hooked up with Hannah's openly gay ex-boyfriend, and was incapable of noticing when the men she loved were obvious drug addicts or emotional basket cases. It's possible Marnie was canonically dim, and her career trajectory spun ever downward: Failed museum curator, questionable musician, jobless in mom's condo.
Jessa was canonically smart. She traced her political exhaustion to Clinton's elimination of Glass-Steagall, and she aspired to be "f---ing fat like Nico," which would be the most erudite thing a Luca Guadagnino character would say. Conversely, Shoshanna initially seemed the most obviously TV-ish, because any young adult character who announces their virginity is also inevitably announcing their first big character arc. But upon rewatch, she's fascinating ambiguous — the little-sister joiner who winds up blowing her friend group to hell.
Did these people like each other? Were any of them realistic? I think Jessa turned into a cartoon earliest, though even real bohemians are only genuinely bohemian for a year or so. Conversely, Shoshanna was a cartoon for most of the show's run, but her occasional frustration was palpable. In the penultimate episode — the true finale — she points out all the "really pretty girls with jobs and purses and nice personalities" at her engagement party. "Those are now my friends," she explains, "Not you guys." It is totally gutting. As bleak as TV gets. The actual series finale walks back that downer, but only a little. (The suggestion that Marnie will never ever leave Hannah's side leaves room for a "Hannah's in Hell now" fan theory.)
There were plenty of goofy episodes, annoying guest stars, uplifting musical cues, and pop culture references. It had, like, Elijah (Andrew Rannells), a totally fine one-off who foolishly became the unfunny-joke-machine third lead. At times, Girls was recognizably trying to just be a solid sitcom, and in its middle years it absolutely was not.
But I always thought Dunham had her finger on her/our generation's joyful-then-jaundiced journey through the 2010s. The precise five-year-period of her show's existence was the time that millennial self-image evolved from "We're saving the world!" to "Nevermind, we're ruining it!" Merely writing her name, for awhile, was like yelling fire in the crowded discourse. And to this day, the Girls creator remains caught in a cobweb of legitimate and illegitimate critique: too feminist or insufficiently feminist; racist and/or hysterically privileged.
I don't know. Even loving Girls madly demanded a certain amount of ongoing frustration. But the low points linger less than genuine stunner episodes, with Dunham often writing or directing hilarious-heartwrenching scenes featuring her own excellent performance. The characters were often awful, and that awfulness could be brave. Call it vice signaling. Created by a young woman, Girls was a pivot point for the kind of TV shows that would get made going forward, though it was always unfair to immediately trace its influence to any comedy about young women. Shows like Broad City or Insecure were always on another wavelength — and they both ended on a happy note of long-distance friendship maintained into everybody's 30s. Unhappy endings aren't necessarily better endings, but they usually are.
To me, the real inheritors are the shows about dreamy-lovable millennials whose misshapen attempts at doing good wind up destroying themselves and the world. Think Mr. Robot: Rami Malek's Elliot is basically Ray Ploshanshky with Charlie Dattolo's computer skills/drug addiction. Or think Search Party, which starts off on Girls territory and ends with The Walking Dead. Include PEN15 as a spiritual prequel, a mesmerizing show about imaginative seventh-graders forcefully turning themselves into disappointed adults.
All of these shows could be good; PEN15 is one of the best things ever made. But they had the benefit of genre trappings — mystery, thriller, art-experiment nostalgia comedy. Even when Girls meandered without a compass, its heart had a coldness that I badly miss in our comfort-TV age. The characters were supposed to be friends, but we were all dancing on their own.
Related content:
