Sometimes my terminal procrastination means that by the time I get around to writing a column everything I wanted to say has…well, changed.
Earlier this year, when Girls returned to HBO for its third season and Variety gave it a sneering pan, I was itching to write a column defending it from yet another round of attacks.
Ever since its 2012 debut, this show has been as much a punching bag as a critical darling…
It’s been accused of everything from nepotism to solipsism to racism, condemned for it’s “disturbing” sex scenes and the hilariously unabashed nudity of its creator Lena Dunhum.
I was baffled at first, then angry, at the vitriol directed at such a genuinely well-written show. It seemed to me a lot of the attacks were fueled by jealousy. Young creative types tend to react bitterly to one of their kind rising to the top. It was ever thus. Here this chubby girl with a really bad arm tattoo resembling an unfinished bunch of grapes was being hailed a kind of TV prodigy or phenom, a genius even. On top of that, she even had the backing of the reigning king of comedy, Judd Apatow.
That’s tough to swallow when you’re struggling just to get an agent.
Other attacks came from bluenose folks offended by the sexual content – which is admittedly darker and more subversive than any female writer has ever put on the small screen. Added to this group were the feminists made uncomfortable by Dunham’s expression of her un-PC fantasies and bad taste in boyfriends. Then pile on the ever-vigilant Diversity Police who felt she had no right to make a show about four white girls in New York City…even though she’s clearly basing it on her life experience. (This is the one I find most galling; I’m all for diversity, but I hate censorship whether it comes from the Left or the Right, and to force some half-assed quota on autobiographical art is beyond ridiculous) Finally, throw in the misogynistic fanboys online who were clearly intimidated by Dunham for not being another cookie-cutter hottie. How dare she take off her clothes! Her exhibitionism was an affront to their stunted juvenile lust.
To say all of these people missed the joke is an understatement.
Thankfully, Dunham mostly just shrugged off the criticism and stayed true to her vision.
Let me put this out there right away: I do think Lena Dunham is a genius.
Oh, you bet. In this case, the hype machine was absolutely right…
What else do you call a 25 year-old, already with a few film credits under her belt, who then writes, directs, produces, and stars in her own TV show which quickly becomes a pop culture touchstone? You call her Ms. Dunham. Because that’s some Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Woody Allen shit. From the moment I watched the first episode I knew she was the real deal. Anyone who has suffered through an indie film festival knows that every beginning filmmaker tries to write about the emotional chaos of being in your 20’s and almost every one of them fail miserably. The subject matter is old news, but it’s her voice that makes it fresh. She understands the best comedy comes out of brutal self-evaluation. Her character Hannah wants to be “if not the voice, a voice” of her generation …the same way Woody Allen liked to pretend he was a suave playboy in his early comedies. The joke is the hubris of youth. She’s not really concerned about speaking for her entire age group, but writing about her own neuroses. If it sheds light on the larger human condition, then all the better. Isn’t that the key to all great writing?
The best example is the fight scene between Hannah & Marnie at the end of Season 1. Go and watch it on YouTube if you can find it. It’s a three and a half minute master class in how to channel real hurt into something hilarious and electrifying. It has the unmistakable ring of truth.
Her dialogue so often rides a razorblade edge between comedy and tragedy, naturalism and genuine wit, without compromising any of it. That’s an unheard of skill at her age – something Neil Simon could never completely master over a life’s work of 30 or 40 plays and screenplays! The mind boggles at the work she could create over the next four decades of her career. If she doesn’t implode for some reason, we have a lot to look forward to.
Now, I’m a middle-aged guy… Is some of her worldview foreign to me? Yes, of course. But that’s what makes it fascinating. Obviously, that’s exactly why Judd Apatow responded to her work and wanted to guide the show. And I was just as shocked as other people by some of it, but I always felt Dunham was venting the messy contents of her brain; that it was organic, not a contrived gimmick. (Okay, the chest-jizzing in Season 2 was perhaps a bridge too far)
Also, how can you not fall a little in love with someone so at ease in her own skin?
She exposes her gloriously imperfect body at every turn, and it achieves just the result she’s aiming for – true intimacy. She’s letting us in, stripping her character of any armor or vanity, and expecting us to recognize Hannah as “one of us”. It’s part of that same brutal honesty. She’s completely aware of the comic effect, but there’s also a brazen self-confidence alongside the vulnerability. And I believe it’s precedent-setting, actually; that she changed something with those scenes – not just for young women with body-image issues, but for all of us. Art takes giant strides forward when artists find new ways to be real. That’s what she did. That’s why it pisses off prudes, feminists, and misogynists all at the same time – and that’s how you know she’s doing something right.
So, yeah, I was going to write all of this much earlier…
Then Season 3 happened.
It’s ironic I haven’t seen much criticism of the season online – presumably, the “haters” aren’t watching anymore and the fans are already sold – but I thought it was a pretty huge stumble. Oh, there were still some great moments here and there, but overall it was a mess.
The drop in quality may have been a product of Dunham handing over scripting duties to other writers, as even the most devoted showrunners eventually are forced to do. Or maybe writing her upcoming book caused her to lose focus. Whatever the reason, the season felt fractured and frantic. It jumped all over the place, never found it’s rhythm. None of the individual episodes had a feeling of being a satisfying chapter on their own. None of the four leads were given a full story arc. Poor Marnie and Shoshanna were almost completely wasted.
This while the show wasted time introducing too many new characters – all of them terrible people…and not in a funny way. Gaby Hoffman’s character, Adam’s mentally ill sister, seemed to drop in from a horror movie. Hannah’s squabbling aunts and angry cousin were much too broad and forced. Richard E. Grant’s drug addict was a good idea, but underutilized. It felt like there were missing episodes needed to fill in these subplots. Louise Lasser goes from meeting Jessa in one episode to asking her to help her commit suicide in the very next – I literally had to check the guide to see if I missed a show.
But why add on any of these people when the leads are being so underserved?
For instance, Hannah’s intriguing struggle with OCD was casually tossed away after one episode…
Why? It could have been truly groundbreaking stuff for a comedy series.
The episode where Hannah tries role-playing in an effort to spice up her sex life with Adam (problem: she “rewrites” the scene in the middle of having sex) had a bit of the old magic, but Adam, always aggravating, has become so inconsistent as a character – loving boyfriend one minute, rage-filled weirdo the next – that he’s really the show’s biggest liability. If the intent was to get us to understand him better, they failed completely. Again, I can only speculate that Adam is based on a real life Exe that Lena Dunham still has conflicting feelings about and therefore cannot be “fixed” as a character. This happens to writers. Erich Segal famously wrote Love Story about a girl who rejected him in college – so it’s no surprise that Ali MacGraw is kind of a bitch and dies at the end. The anger is right there between the lines. Dunham needs to move on. Whoever Hannah dates next can be freaky, just hopefully more comprehensible as a real human being.
However you couch it, transitional season or treading water, it was a major letdown.
Right now they are beginning production on Season 4 and I have to believe both Dunham and Apatow (who is no slouch, obviously) are astute enough to do a full post-mortem and bring the series quietly back to center. After all, I’m just holding it to its own high standard.
I’m still a fan and Dunham is still a genius…but unfortunately, Girls joins that long list of shows that has at least one bad season ‘tripping up’ the run.
But hey – the show, like Dunham herself, is only human after all.
