Girls on HBO
New series bursts the Sex and the City bubble,
Sex and the City Jr.? No wait, they’ve already got one: The CW is doing it next season. They’re calling it The Carrie Diaries.
Girls isn’t that. I’m not sure exactly what it is. It is the same premise on paper, without all the glam. And its creator, indie darling Lena Dunham ( Tiny Furniture), will cop to watching a lot of SATC when she was young(er). One of the girls in Girls even has a
SATC poster on the wall and fantasizes about which of the principals she most closely resembles. “I did grow up watching Sex and
the City,” Dunham will confess. “One of the best New Year’s Eves of my life was watching a Sex and the
City marathon with my mother, maybe nine episodes in a row.
“I don’t think I thought I would ever make a Sex and the City show. I think I thought I would move back to New York and have a really elegant boyfriend and a really incredible shoe closet . . . that was not the reality that I was greeted with.”
To get a sense of that reality, check out the debut of Girls, her semi-autobiographical cable comedy debuting Sunday at 10:30 p.m. on HBO Canada. Or go further back, to 2009 and
Tiny Furniture, a SXSW film festival winner for Best Narrative Feature.
“I certainly think there are similar themes,” Dunham acknowledges. “But it’s about a different kind of girl. Tiny Furniture was really specific to sort of the experience of going back to New York and realizing it’s not the same city that you lived in as a child, that your experience of being an adult there is going to be radically different.
“This is about girls who aren’t from New York. They grew up watching Sex and the City and thought they were going to live the dream. And now that they’ve arrived, it’s something decidedly different.”
Girls is produced by the prolific Judd Apatow, returning to his TV roots ( Freaks & Geeks) after cornering the market on commercial film comedy ( Anchorman, 40-YearOld Virgin, Knocked Up, Bridesmaids).
Apatow has made something of a specialty of flawed, less-thanlikeable characters. “I think we’ve all along thought that it’s important that you realize that it’s okay to be annoyed by (these girls), that they’re making terrible mistakes. There’s a sense of self-entitlement. “They’re immature, and it is every disaster that happens before you figure out your life.”
ROOKIE MISTAKE There’s annoying and there’s an
noying. Then there’s downright insulting. Another new Sunday night debut, NYC 22 (CBS and Global at 10 p.m.), would appear for all intents and purposes to be predicated on the assumption that the average TV viewer is an idiot. Okay, so they may have a point. And I’m not about to start an argument with Robert De Niro, who for some inexplicable reason is this sorry show’s executive producer. Oh, what the heck. Hey, Bobby. Yeah, you. I’m talking to you . . . Have you never seen Rookie Blue? It’s produced here in Canada by Global, the same network that carries your new show (and here I use the term loosely). You may have caught it on ABC. But clearly not, since it is the exact same show as NYC 22. Except good. I guess the premise isn’t the freshest thing around; I can remember three or four prior cop shows about newbies on the beat. But the characters and the appealing young actors that portray them make Rookie Blue quite fresh and eminently watchable.
NYC 22 is anything but fresh: it smells like overflow from a Manhattan sewer. And it is actually physically painful to sit through (this from enraged gnashing of teeth), thereby adding injury to insult.
A couple of the actors are actually pretty good — in anything other than this. The characters, on the other hand . . .
Adam Goldberg is Ray “Lazarus” Harper, an embittered former crime reporter seeking a fresh start on the force.
Leelee Sobieski is Jennifer “White House” Perry, a tough-asnails former Marine MP seeking a fresh start on the force. Tom Reed is Ahmad (no nickname) Khan, a marginalized Muslim seeking a fresh start on the force. Harold House Moore is Jayson “Jackpot” Toney, a former NBA superstar seeking a fresh . . . need I go on? I thought not.
We need only one more cliché to make this picture complete: The no-nonsense training officer, Terry Kinney as Daniel “Yoda” Dean, seeking to bust all of their chops as he indoctrinates them into the force.
Bob, Bob, Bob. Go back to the movies. Surely there’s another Fockers sequel in the works. Anything other than this. Rob Salem usually writes Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Sundays. Email: rsalem@thestar.ca; Twitter: @robsalem