Year(s): 2012-2017
Created by: Lena Dunham
Country: US
Language: English
Created by and starring Lena Dunham (Tiny Furniture) and executive produced by Judd Apatow (40 Year Old Virgin), Girls is a polarizing television show that has as much hate thrown at it as it does love. It has been praised for its portrayal of women and female friendship but criticized as classist, racist, transphobic and misguided. Consisting of six seasons which have 62 episodes in total, this is a fairly difficult show to review fairly.
Girls is about the assorted humiliations, disasters and rare triumphs of four very different twenty-something girls: Hannah (Lena Dunham) an aspiring writer; Marnie (Allison Williams), an art gallery assistant and cousins Jessa (Jemima Kirke) and Shoshanna (Zosia Memet)
First off, this may not be the most accurate review of Girls since, although I am pretty much the same age as our characters, I am not the right sex/gender. Often the choices of the girls in this series are baffling to me. In one episode a character has an abortion...without telling her boyfriend and then doesn't care when he later finds out and is shocked. What!? The shows politics are often way too far left for me and leave me bewildered by the apparent lack of logic. Of course our main characters aren't supposed to be the ideal; they are misguided, misinformed and often irrational 20-somethings that have no idea how the real world is supposed to work.
The same aggravation I get from Dunham's stupidity is also partly why I like the show. Girls challenges me to think differently. to reflect on who I am as a person, and sometimes exposes my bias'. Is it coincidence that I, a man, think the most logical characters in this show are men? Though sometimes episodes are poorly written wanna-be feminist nonsense, more often than not I come across really thought provoking episodes that act as a window into how society acts and feels. I like Girls even though I often find myself rolling my eyes at it.
Girls is a MUCH smarter and more reckless Sex in the City. It is a difficult show, filled with baffling plot points, but is ultimately worthwhile and fun to reflect upon and revisit. I have a feeling Dunham and I would not get along at all in real life.
No comments:
Post a Comment