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.
SeeHow I Met Your Father, barf.
Mark Schafer/HBO
So the best thing aboutGirlswas all the acid in its veins.
But creatorLena Dunhamoften 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.
A bit like asking: When was Williamsburg?
You had to be there, and maybe none of us should have been.
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.
Now the whole thing just feels absent.
Its stars have faded, witha single exceptionwhosecentaur masculinityproves the rule.
(The point ofGirlswas neverinventing Darth Vader’s grandson.)
The show’s influence, though profound, is generally disavowed.
A shame, becauseGirlscould be unbelievably awesome.
It sends her on a journey: Old boyfriend, meaningful tweet, Robyn.
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.
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.
Dunham wrote and directed the first three episodes.
There’s an argument to be made thatGirlswas never better, or more completely itself.
Perfection!!!!!
I remember that party episode being pretty buzzy Shoshanna smokes crack!
but it’s heinous on rewatch.
Lack of authenticity was one of the nicer things you could say aboutGirls.
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 punch in-A Bert.
But the oddest thing about this couple was how Marnie turned powers-of-ten more self-destructive.
Jessa was canonically smart.
Did these people like each other?
Were any of them realistic?
“Thoseare 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.
There were plenty of goofy episodes, annoying guest stars, uplifting musical cues, and pop culture references.
But I always thought Dunham had her finger on her/our generation’s joyful-then-jaundiced journey through the 2010s.
to “Nevermind, we’re ruining it!”
Merely writing her name, for awhile, was like yelling fire in the crowded discourse.
I don’t know.
Even lovingGirlsmadly demanded a certain amount of ongoing frustration.
The characters were often awful, and that awfulness could be brave.
Call it vice signaling.
Unhappy endings aren’t necessarily better endings, but they usually are.
Robot: Rami Malek’s Elliot is basically Ray Ploshanshky with Charlie Dattolo’s computer skills/drug addiction.
Or thinkSearch Party, which starts off onGirlsterritory and ends withThe Walking Dead.
IncludePEN15as a spiritual prequel, a mesmerizing show about imaginative seventh-graders forcefully turning themselves into disappointed adults.
All of these shows could be good;PEN15is one of the best things ever made.
But they had the benefit of genre trappings mystery, thriller, art-experiment nostalgia comedy.
Even whenGirlsmeandered 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.
