'Girls' Review: Lena Dunham Makes The Girls Grow Up
Girls was such a pop-culture phenomenon when it premiered in 2012 — the subject of hundreds, thousands of think-pieces about this new, millennial-minded approach to television-making — that it was sometimes hard to experience it for what it was: a sitcom about some pals and their friends and lovers. In the fifth-season premiere, we get Girls with a bracing clarity: creator Lena Dunham goes for more laughs, more tender moments, and we don’t have to always think about what this show is telling us about The Way We Live Now.
In the premiere airing Sunday on HBO — right after Vinyl; good luck with that time-period flow, Dunham! — Allison Williams’s Marnie is getting married, and even though the more sensible among us harbor grave reservations about Desi, Girls reminds us that love is blind and anyway, who doesn’t like to watch a bride melt down and slather all of those around her with her molten lava of anxiety? Bonus points for giving prominent placement to Rita Wilson, returning as Marnie’s realist-cynical-worldweary mother.
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The premiere also provides a showcase for the character for whom I feel the most fondness, Ray (Alex Karpovsky), that romantic disguised as a cynic, who sits, observes, and provides commentary on the craziness around him, even as he still pines for Marnie and knows she’s fallen for the wrong guy — that he’s really The One for her, which probably isn’t true, either, but a guy can dream, can’t he?
In the initial episodes, at least, Dunham’s Hannah is the more mature of the “girls,” doing a reasonably good job of holding down her teaching job (although she makes a hilarious misstep in trying to teach Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus to eighth-graders), and, with that sweet boyfriend Fran (Jake Lacy), conducting herself in a rather more mature manner than she has in the past.
More poignantly, the second episode places Hannah in the position of parenting her father, whose gay coming-out has proven extremely trying. It’s great to see the way Peter Scolari has taken command of this role, bringing to it a highly believable combination of exhilaration, worry, confusion, and power that makes his scenes with Dunham charged with dramatic energy.
Watch the cast of Girls play “Who Said It?”
The new season pushes Adam Driver’s Adam and Jemima Kirke’s Jessa into a fraught relationship from which no good (for them) can come, but is interesting to watch — such a clash of acting styles those two project! And Girls continues its valiant attempt to integrate Zosia Mamet’s Shoshanna into the group in a believable manner. It’s doing this through off-beat ways that may actually end up working: Who’d have thought giving her a white-blonde new haircut and a wider view of life after an immersion in Japanese pop culture would help Shosh better assimilate into life in New York and her life as a Girls character?
Girls airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on HBO.
