HBO’s new dramedy Girls has been compared to that other HBO series about four women in New York, who followed up their fame and fortune with a couple of bad movies. But truly, Judd Apatow and Lena Dunham’s take on women being hurdled toward adulthood could not be more different from the latter, except to say that there are four girls, and there is New York. Ok, and one is a writer, one is rigid, one gets around, and one is insanely irritating. But Girls is a more realistic version of life and what it means to be struggling and undervalued in a big city, where identity comes from who you know, who you sleep with, and where you work. In Sex and the City, everyone was mysteriously wealthy, shooting hundreds out their Fendi baguettes and into bottomless martini glasses and lunch at Pastis. The characters in Girls have swallowed pride, borrowed rent money and thrift store sweaters. In other words, it’s a post-recession world.
Critics have called it a white person’s show, representing a small cross section of what young, privileged twenty-something’s face. Valid? Maybe. Either way, whether any of us have experienced their plight or not, we know these people, and a version of their experience.
Hannah, played by the star, writer and director of the show, Lena Dunham (of Tiny Furniture fame) is a schlubby Brooklyn hipster with an endearing and unending caustic wit. Unlike Carrie Bradshaw, Hannah has no eye or heart for fashion, exclusive restaurants, a Mr. Big or an Aiden, nor does she have an unattainable one-bedroom brownstone in the Upper East Side seventies. The pilot opens when her parental lifeline – aka unearned supplemental monthly income—gets severed. Hyperventilation and opium drinking ensues. That’s much of what you need to know about Hannah. She’s desperate, but smart. Neurotic, but sane. Loyal, but judgmental. An adult, without having earned the title. It’s a magnum opus to her generation, as she boldly dares to point out.
In the Carrie Bradshaw version of life, an unending sea of successful and creative men, not to mention Jimmy Choo, Christian Dior, and Dolce and Gabbana (fresh from the runway), hop in and out of the women’s lives. Fantasy needs no limitations, much in the way that reality expects them at every turn. Girls is grittier, smarter, and darker than Sex and the City would ever have wanted to be, with its bada’bum one liners, and cliché relationships. Not that it wasn’t good—it empowered women in a different way, to dare to believe that such a life could exist. But Dunham wields a deft and different sword at the writer’s table, and the sex positions are dissimilar this time around. She dares to bare her dimpled, tattooed arms, which is a world away from Sarah Jessica Parker baring her svelte, stiletto clad legs, or Samantha, her all. Where Sex and the City celebrates fashion, glamour, friendships that never fade or complicate, and life at the top, Girls goes deeper, on behalf of the rest of us. It contemplates the difference between how the virgins and the sluts navigate the playing field, the unpaid internships, the under-employed, the dimly lit walk-up twenty minutes from the closest subway, and the value of self worth. If Sex and the City were airing today, would Carrie still be getting all those writing gigs? We couldn’t help but wonder.
For its flaw of sometimes stepping just over the razor’s edge, Girls it has enough layers to smooth out the roughness. It’s been snidely bashed for being “too white,” but on the contrary, it’s got loads of color.
