Sandra Bernhard is the only celebrity I follow on my nascent Twitter account. Periodically, she talks about “the kids” and how they’re “keeping it fresh.” Recently, Mz Bernhard went tweet-crazy over Lena Dunham and her new HBO series Girls (while she didn’t exactly say that Dunham was keeping it fresh, her praise was tantamount to that).
Around the same time, I talked with my upstairs neighbor about how necessary it was for me to watch Tiny Furniture, Dunham’s first film. Had I seen it? I really should watch it with her, and I did I know about her upcoming HBO series Girls?
So I watched the premiere of Lena Dunham’s new HBO series Girls last night.
As a general rule, in the overall arc of any TV show’s run, premiere episodes are always the worst ones. All the awkward exposition must be done — characters have to be introduced, plotlines and conflicts have to be set up, the door to people’s backstories has to be left just slightly ajar — while maintaining the narrative integrity of the individual episode.
If Sunday’s premiere was the worst entry that Girls has in its run, then Lena Dunham is set to take over the universe, or at least the thoughtful, witty corner of the universe that’s genuinely worth caring about. The episode wasn’t perfect — its moments of sitcom zaniness (opium tea tantrums?) seemed out of sync tonally — but if that’s Dunham the writer at her most awkward, I have no complaints.
That’s my only con; how about the pros?
1. No gay best friend (yet). I was waiting for it: someone pretty and witty and gay in a too-colourful cardigan, perfectly tailored jeans and nice shoes who tells Dunham’s Hannah how it is. It’s the hallmark of these shows: they’re “for women,” and so, assumed to be devoid of male viewers, they need to be packed with characters that will appeal to the non-male population (in TV-marketing-land, women and gays). He’s cute, he’s funny, he’s unavailable, and he talks and thinks just like a girl, and I hate that character. The show takes place in New York, so obviously there’s a homo somewhere in the wings, but judging by Dunham’s pitch-perfect characterization of everyone else (except for the coddling father; too broad), I actually look forward to his eventual flounce onstage.
2. Emotionally significant sequences that take place entirely in the bathroom. These are human beings, after all, and they have to pee, and sometimes, their friends have to hash it out with them while they do so.
3. “Real” sex scenes. Somehow, TV and movies have a problem depicting sex: it’s either a Catherine Breillat festival of psychological misery, or comically impotent, or a shade shy of porn. Hannah is in the midst of an affair with an icky man, but nobody gets moralistic about it. It just happens, and she enjoys it.
There’s always something slightly disingenuous about verité-style TV shows detailing the petty humiliations of making it in the real world. The 25-year old Dunham has been in the biz for six years now, and Girls has been earning her generational buzz for a while now; her days of petty humiliation are behind her, at least in one particular sense. Nevertheless, all of Girls‘ moments — sticky humiliations, mundane conversations, confused flailings, mistake sex — ring true, and (more important) ring humanely funny. In this genre of television, the soil of identifiable verisimilitude that nurtures the fiction is often neglected. Dunham is, above all else, a stellar writer, and the great success of Girls is her ability, pace Mz Bernhard, to keep it real.
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Sholem Krishtalka is the Toronto Standard’s art critic.
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