David Berry,
‘What began as the life and times of four young women struggling to get by in the city has become the Contabulous Fabtraptions of Hannah H. Horvath and the Life Experience Gang’
Whatever you think of Girls, someone, somewhere has probably written a 1,000-word essay about it. Entering the fifth of what HBO has confirmed will be six seasons, it might be the most think-pieced- about television show ever aired, at least on a words- per- minute- of- television basis. Game of Thrones and Walking Dead might inspire non- stop speculating about who’s going to die next and what the next twist will be, but few shows can match Girls for searching treatises on what it all means.
Surely some of this is just hitting a zeitgeisty sweet spot: a series unabashedly about self- involved millennials that debuted just as self-involved millennials were given unprecedented platform and support for exploring their self- involvement — in that respect, HBO betting on Lena Dunham was just the peak of a pyramid of online outlets and social media giving the next generation a voice, even if it was one of the few offering more than just exposure. Girls sure leaned into that niche, too. Particularly early on, the show felt as much like it was springing fully formed from the minds of a thousand twentysomething Athenas peddling their thoughts anywhere from Jezebel to Tumblr. And, credit where it is due, the show was often at the forefront, the ship that left churning, bubbling seas of hot takes in its wake: we certainly may have had a long conversations about depictions of women’s bodies anyway, but it didn’t hurt to have Dunham whipping off her shirt and daring us to react.
But for all its provocation and early claims of being a voice of a generation, as it has worn on, there is increasingly less there. The show seems less searching and curious than smug, less tuned in to its generational peers than tuned in to the very specific subset of generational peers who only leave Brooklyn if they miss their subway stop but who flatter themselves about being infinitely more worldly than everyone else.
Its pointed exclusivity — which you could probably argue was there from the get-go, especially if you were, like, black or too poor to get HBO or something weird like that — could be construed, in certain lights, as a plus, I guess. I certainly prefer my art to be specific, and this is a microscopically small niche to be exploring. But Girls’ minuscule focus seems to stem less from action than reaction: it feels like a show whose worst tendencies have forced it into a corner, from which it’s left to try and make sense of the rest of the room.
Most specifically, I think, Girls is addicted to surprising you. Its view of people is that they are irrational and impulsive, which is reasonably astute: Hannah and her spiritual sisters constantly shoot themselves in the foot, as we all do, especially when we’re too young to have spent much time hobbling around. What it fails to recognize, I think, is that our irrationality stems from a much more prosaically sensible world, that we don’t really act impulsive until we’ve been worn down by the grind of routine.
Girls doesn’t have any time for that routine, at least not anymore. It flits from pointed life event to pointed life event, from your best friend getting engaged to the musician she was having an affair and signing a record deal with to the revelation of your father’s long-closeted homosexuality to the birth of the baby of the ex-junkie who lives in the apartment below you and his girlfriend, who is also the sister of your longtime on-again, off-again boyfriend. What began as the life and times of four young women struggling to get by in the city has become the Contabulous Fabtraptions of Hannah H. Horvath and the Life Experience Gang.
It is maybe a little obtuse to ding a television program for dramatics, except for the fact that Girls still trucks in the myth that it’s life, or more like life than the average television show. Born out of the American independent film mumblecore movement — Dunham’s breakthrough feature, Tiny Furniture, was essentially turning that awkward, neurotically talky esthetic to her own rarefied life — it was less about “telling it like it is” so much as just, like, telling it.
In a weird way, Girls’ insistence on always having everything happen feels like an extension of this, or at least an evolutionary mutation. If mumbling was the way to capture the awkwardness and self-reflection of life, rampant oddity is an attempt to capture its inherent strangeness, and how little it feels like it’s actually in our control. But if neither is exactly the whole picture, selfdoubt at least feels like more of it: our lives aren’t really out of control so much as unintended, awkward pauses mistaken for pregnant ones, goals revealed to be bad decisions, relationships slipping through our fingers while we focus on other things. These can feel like bolts from the blue when we finally wake up to them, but it doesn’t take much mulling over to see where they come from.
And that’s maybe why Girls’ last season, and the early parts of its new one, feels so out of touch with even itself. It’s self- involved without being particularly thoughtful about it, awkward without ever really wondering why. It’s just after the sensation, and spends no time on what it might mean. That is part of how we live sure, but as all those thinkpieces prove, it’s not all of it. Girls, as weird as it sounds to say, needs to turn in and examine itself more.
Season 5 of Girls premières Feb. 21