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.

GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS

Over the weekend I watched the entirity of Girls, season 3. This is a thing I have done ever since the first season, when I learned that all these characters are horrible people and I can not suffer them week in and week out for a couple months straight. But Lena Dunham is an amazing talent (I will not hear detractors on this, because you are wrong), and I realized that 10 or 12 or however many episodes in an entire season only breaks out to like 5 or 6 hours of a single Saturday.

This is a much more doable, and in my eyes preferable, way to consume the show. The awfulness is less awful in condensed form, and the full season arc occurs over the length of an evening, so I can appreciate and absorb it without hating everyone. I mean, I don’t think it’s unintentional that the characters are monstrous. I think that’s sort of the point — or one of them, at least. But monstrous people are still monstrous, and so I’m more a rip-the-bandaid-off-at-once person than a slowly-peel-the-bandage-back-and-try-not-to-pull-any-hair person. The latter takes longer and you still pull out your hair.

Anyway, my thoughts on season 3 are thus:

1. Every character has his or her own (multiple, numerous, mind-jarringly obnoxious and self-involved) flaws, but for me personally, Jessa would be the absolute worst to have to interact with in any capacity in real life. I could see — honestly, I wouldn’t argue — with people saying it’s Hannah or Shosh or Marnie or Adam or Ray or Elijah or LITERALLY ANYONE ELSE ON THE SHOW, but for me it’s Jessa, because she’s the worst and completely incapable of conducting herself in society like an even remotely normal person. It’s actually a pity The Wire didn’t have this as one of their March brackets: Who is the ABSOLUTE WORST character on HBO’s Girls? (It’s totally Jessa.)

2. I feel like Hannah is too crazy. I don’t mean Lena Dunham, because while Dunham plays Hannah, and there are no doubt similarities, there are also no doubt many differences. To wit, Lena Dunham is an amazingly talented and accomplished writer, producer and director, in addition to acting in her own series. She clearly works very hard on her show and focuses on making it great on multiple levels, across multiple characters and storylines. Hannah, on the other hand, is a total mess. And I would be okay with Hannah being a total mess except for the fact that Hannah is actually a semi-successful writer. She’s not J.K. Rowling or anything, but in season 2 she got to work with one publisher on an ebook, and in season 3 she got an offer from another publisher to publish her stories as an actual book, while also working (briefly) as a successful advertorial writer for GQ. But, to me, honestly, Hannah is so crazy and so unfocused, and so neurotic, and so all over the place all the time, I find it highly suspect that she actually has the patience or resolve, not to write, but to edit and revise and rewrite her work. I found it completely believable in season 2 when she was kind of flaking out on this great opportunity she had to write something professionally. I find it less believable in season 3 when she’s apparently accomplished this task. Writing, for someone talented at writing, is not that difficult. Writing something polished that is worthy of being published is another thing altogether, and it’s CRAZY HARD. It’s not something that just happens, flowing from your mind to the tips of your fingers, even if you’re the type of person who writes all the time and is really in tune with your literary voice. Editing and Revising is often long, painstaking work, and I really found myself hung up over the question of whether Hannah has the poise for that kind of tedious labor. I could be wrong, but I’ve seen nothing in the show to suggest I am.