'Girls' Season Finale: A Birth, a Song, a New Beginning?
Warning: This review contains storyline and character spoilers for Sunday night’s season finale of Girls.
It was a good, often surprising, prickly season for Girls, which wrapped up its fourth on Sunday night. The finale, titled “Home Birth” and written by Jenni Konner, Lena Dunham, and Judd Apatow, worked best as something Girls frequently doesn’t seem interested in being: a sitcom. There were laughs. Often big laughs.
Yes, I found Caroline’s harebrained home-birth subplot hilarious, with Caroline and Laird the least responsible new parents imaginable. In real life, I’d call the police on these two to protect the infant Jessa-Hannah; as TV, I’d probably watch a spinoff that Dunham could call Parents.
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Some of the best stuff this season has come from Ray, who’s proven to be Girls’s most valuable supporting player. His calm yet devastating evisceration of Desi as being unworthy of Marnie was a triumph of comic speech.
What I like about the way Dunham has handled Ray’s character is that while he is positive he’s the only person who understands Marnie, Dunham has made these characters complex enough for the viewer to realize there is both more and less to Marnie than Ray devoutly believes.
And Dunham, who also directed this episode, certainly gave Allison Williams a beautifully framed showcase for Marnie’s music — indeed, in the space of a few minutes, Dunham did a better job of convincing us of Williams’s musical skills than the entire NBC production of Peter Pan did. Yes, I know, the song she sang was warmed-over early-Simon-and-Garfunkel treacle, but that’s what it was supposed to be (it’s why Desi is, at bottom, a fraud), and Marnie/Williams really sold it.
Early in the season, it seemed as though Girls had given up on figuring out what to do with Shoshanna, but the past couple of episodes have rescued the character. Her election-night scenes with Ray last week, and her wonderful job interview this week with SNL’s Aidy Bryant, were tightly controlled comedy, moments that reined in Shosh’s goofiest, most overused characteristics.
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I’ve been ambivalent about the show’s decision to have Hannah’s dad, Tad, come out as gay, mostly because it led to dialogue emerging from both Tad and Loreen that struck me as tin-eared. But I’m glad enough to see more of Peter Scolari and Becky Ann Baker, and if it means Dunham wants to explore this now-loveless marriage more in the future, as was implied in their scene this night, then I’m up for the glum adventurousness of that.
Finally, I’m not sure I buy Hannah and Fran The Kindly Teacher as a couple, but then, Hannah has made so many flukey choices in matters of romance and career, why not go with her on a rare staid approach to boyfriending? Good for you, Horvath; even better for you, Dunham.
