Summer TV Binge: GIRLS

I’ve written before about how I like to watch HBO’s Girls. The system works really well for me, and I see no reason to change it. Season four of Girls aired from January through March (ish) of this year, and I got around to it a couple of weeks ago, knocking it out in two days instead of one because the mature content ensures I don’t turn it on until late at night.

This season starts out very similarly to every other season of the show. Hannah (Lena Dunham) is flighty and neurotic, Marnie (Allison Williams) is somehow selfishly blind to her own bad behavior but self-righteously judgmental of others, Jessa (Jemima Kirke) is a tactless and ridiculously awful person — I mean, they’re all awful people, but Jessa is really bad — and Shosh (Zosia Mamet) is both entitled and insecure. And through all the comings and goings of the show, all the events that these four go through over the course of the season, that’s pretty much exactly how their personalities stay. Until the very end.

Like a light switch being flicked to the on position, the final episode of the fourth season of Girls found Marnie coming into her own as a performer, independent of selfish men who would bring her down or distract her. And Jessa for once in her awful, awful life was truly helpful in her take charge way and seemed to find a direction in her life that feels more substantial than all her previous flights of fancy. Shosh, meanwhile, is moving to Tokyo, where she will be an actual adult career woman and could really truly (theoretically) grow up. But most shocking of all, of course, is Hannah, who despite having a truly inappropriate besties relationship with a student at an oblivious level only Hannah could ever possibly achieve, manages to come away with a mature, seemingly healthy relationship with an actual adult male who would most assuredly downplay all her drama. (This last thing did require a six-month time jump, though, because Hannah is Hannah and also an infant.)

All of these changes would be shocking in any context, given the nature of the characters up to this point, but what’s perhaps most shocking of all is the realization that, while all the earlier episodes were happening, the show was building up right to these moments, and the characters were growing into these new, almost fully adult people without our even realizing it. Would Hannah have been able to turn Adam (Adam Driver) away if she hadn’t glimpsed a life without him? Would she ever have considered teaching — a vocation that, lack of boundaries aside, she seems really good at — had it not been for her failure in Iowa? It turns out, along the way these girls actually have been absorbing some life lessons. It’s just an excruciatingly slow process.

Another point of the season that I thought a lot about, and that, if I remember correctly, had been covered extensively in articles around the time the episode aired, was the performance of Gillian Jacobs as Mimi-Rose and, more specifically, her abortion. In my experience there are a lot of shows that tout a woman’s right to choose but never actually have a woman make that choice. The fact that Mimi-Rose does it behind the scenes, as it were, without discussion or debate, is fascinating to me. It doesn’t mean, as I think some have assumed, that she was cavalier about her decision. We don’t see her reaction to her pregnancy or her decision-making process at all. We simply see the part in which she tells Adam she can’t partake in certain activities because of it. Not coldly, but matter of fact. “This is what happened, and these are things I can’t currently do because of it.” And voila! All of a sudden an abortion is actually being treated on television as a true medical decision between a woman and her doctor and not really anyone else’s business. I love that choice as a story point, I love the decision to feature something so bold (much more controversial than Lena Dunham’s nudity, I’m sure), and I love the conclusions it seemed to draw. Very courageous, truly.

So maybe the tagline of the season has it right, and maybe these Girls are finally growing into women.

All seasons of Girls are available on HBOGo, HBO OnDemand (where I watch them) and Amazon Instant Video.

Summer TV Binge: COMMUNITY

I was a big fan of Community from the start, and I watched every single episode religiously, even as NBC moved it around and constantly threatened cancellation and fired Dan Harmon then brought him back and the show suffered huge bouts of inconsistency. I stuck by it. I loved it anyway. I mean, I didn’t love the G.I. Joe episode. That was terrible. And I was never a huge fan of Chang (Ken Jeong), if only because it was far too easy and too tempting to overuse him. And I’ve missed Troy (Donald Glover) terribly since he left a few seasons ago. But I still stuck with it because the stuff it was great at was SO GREAT. I could not, however, follow it to weekly viewing on Yahoo! Screen, because I didn’t even know Yahoo! Screen was a thing.

It turns out, Yahoo! Screen is a thing, and not just an alternate timeline thing. It really exists, and Community season six really did air on it — weekly, even, instead of all being released at once like Netflix and Amazon do. I chose to watch it in two big chunks, half at mid-season and half a few weeks back, well after the final episode dropped. And I’m glad I did, even if it wasn’t the same.

Season six of Community sees the cocky Jeff Winger (Joel McHale) still leading the rag-tag study group, though now only three other original members still remain — still students, apparently, though Jeff is now faculty. It’s also no longer a study group, but a Save Greendale committee. (Their community college has long been on the brink of disaster, much like the show itself.) To round out the table, Chang has been given a permanent seat (though he’s still somewhat a group outcast, which I appreciate), and two new faces have joined the gang in Elroy (Keith David), an old programming whiz who lost touch with the advances in his field and has enrolled in classes, and Frankie (Paget Brewster), a buy-the-book straight face (with her own quirkiness) administrator there to balance the books — and to offset the absurdity of everyone else. The hilariously bizarre Dean Pelton (Jim Rash) is around more too — both more and less frivolous than he’s been in the past.

As for the other returning regulars, in many ways they too are drastically different from who they were originally, yet somehow without seeming to have advanced much in their lives. Annie (Alison Brie) is no less neurotic and driven, really, even if she acts more as a mother of the group now. And Abed (Danny Pudi) is still completely obsessed with framing everything like a movie or a TV episode, despite being slightly more human in his interactions. Only Britta (Gillian Jacobs) is more of a mess than she was at the start of the show, but that’s an evolution the show has engineered for many seasons, not just this one. But even as in many ways the characters have become caricatures and the show has become a gimmicky shell of its former, whip-smart and clever self, I still really appreciated this final season send-off.

The show was still funny in its sixth season, mind you; it hadn’t lost that. And at the end they declared that Greendale had indeed been saved, again using the school as a metaphor for the show and going out the way they wanted. There was a sense of closure with this season that definitely felt lacking for me in all the previous ones. Nothing they did will ever live up to the original “Modern Warfare” or Annie’s Boobs or “Troy and Abed in the Morning” or the built-specifically-for-me alternate timelines episode “Remedial Chaos Theory,” but season six was still a bunch of goofy fun. And at the end Annie took an FBI internship and she and Jeff kissed goodbye in a way that wasn’t creepy despite them being portrayed as having a drastic age gap at the beginning of the series, and I sighed a happy sigh of satisfaction, which not many series finales accomplish. So I guess I have Yahoo! Screen to thank for that.

Community season six is available to watch on Yahoo! Screen, which I promise is a real thing. All previous seasons are available on Hulu.