THE GIRLS ARE NOT ALRIGHT
HBO’S NEW SHOW GIRLS HAS BEEN MAKING ALL THE RIGHT NOISES AND FOR ALL THE RIGHT REASONS. JARED CARL MILLAN TELLS US WHY THIS NEW SHOW HAS TAKEN EVERYBODY BY STORM.
If there is one invaluable thing HBO offers its original series it is creative freedom; think Sex and the City and Entourage and True Blood. If one thinks about it the common denominator of all these shows, and most others under HBO’s list of past and present and future programs, is their raw and somewhat uncompromising nature. And with Girls it is exactly that kind of freedom that makes the show brilliant—equal parts of brutal honesty, obdurate sexuality, and painful comedy. Its premise is nothing short of ordinary: some number of independent—a word that is in the purpose of this article used very lightly—twenty-somethings in one city or another trying and failing and learning to stand on their two feet. A formula so hackneyed that if one pursues the discourse one would find in the history of television some many dozen programs that
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/August 2012
have worked with a variation of the premise. Let us discuss the formula. The girls. Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham—Girls’ creator, director, writer, co-executive producer, executive producer), the show’s heroine with all the wrong virtues, is an aspiring twenty-something writer. Marnie Michaels (Allison Williams) is Hannah’s serious and somewhat uptight best friend and roommate. Shoshanna Shapiro (Zosia Mamet) is a student at New York University, an ebullient and virginal young lady whose sensibilities seem to have come from a commonplace girls’ magazine. Then we have Shoshanna’s British cousin and roommate, Jessa Johansson (Jemima Kirke), a capricious traveler who comes back to the big apple at the beginning of the series.