Girls ‘Pilot’: Angst In the Big Apple

Some might be quick to define HBO’s new half-hour series Girls it as a hipster version of 2 Broke Girls or Sex and the City; others might compare it to more experimental, subtle fare like Louie. Nobody would really be wrong: the show is all of those, and none of them at all. This is Lena Dunham’s story, and while its scope is intimate – and deliberately narrow in its scope, there are moments that speak to a larger audience. While it’s not the strongest pilot in the world, Girls is a promising introduction to a much-hyped series, playing off familiar comedic ideas with a well-realized vision of its world and its characters.

Like most pilots, Girls begins with its protagonist Hannah (Dunham) at a crossroads: her parents are cutting off her post-graduate supply of “until you get on your feet” allowance. After fumbling away her year long internship, she’s left in a position a lot of us younger creative types are left in: wondering how to put a college degree to use in an over crowded economy where creativity isn’t as valued as it once was. She shares an apartment (and occasionally, a bed and shower) with her best friend Marnie, and the pilot is really about establishing the world around these two women, who have a great friendship with each other, but tenous ones with the rest of the world, at best.

Marnie is the Type-A personality of the group, but oddly, the most well-drawn character in the first episode – outside of Hannah, of course. She’s self-aware in ways most high-strung characters aren’t, and her witty insights were certainly a highlight. At times, Girls felt like it was trying too hard to be awkward (the sex scene and the dinner scene at the beginning stand out), but in the scenes where Marnie and Hannah are discussing things like the hierarchy of technology in relationships or each other, it felt much more relaxed and personal, and a little less like characters acting as mouthpieces for the show.

Like any television show in its infancy, Girls has other problems to smooth out moving forward. The other two female characters were broadly drawn at best, and Shoshanna’s speech about Sex and the City felt like a simultaneous curtsey and middle finger to its predecessor. Girls is too grounded in realism to be participating in moments of meta-awareness like that, and if there’s one scene of the pilot that sticks out, it’s that one. Nowhere else in the pilot are the characters treated like cartoons but in that scene, and it feels disconnected from the rest of the show.

But however much the intentional awkwardness and moments of pretension irked me, I’m intrigued by the show. There’s isn’t a lot of forced drama or comedy, and even the opium-assisted part of the pilot doesn’t become too outlandish or attention-grabbing, a big fear I had as soon as it was introduced. I really enjoyed the characters of Ray and Adam, who were layered beyond the typical ‘thick-headed guys who like shiny things, loud noises, and sweating’ males pushed into the few female-created shows on television. Too often are male-created shows treating women as imbeciles, and vice versa – I quite enjoyed the equal intellectual playing field the males were given, even within the tropes of touchy-feely boyfriend, smarty pants wise guy, and laid back hipster/sexual partner.

Some might find the lack of intentional comedic moments boring, and others might be turned off by the well-worn story of girls and their first-world problems, but the confidence in Dunham’s writing and direction are intriguing, and I’ll definitely be addingGirls into the rotation for the first season. There aren’t many creative people who have as much freedom to write, produce, and direct as Dunham does (in fact, Louie CK is about the only other comparsion) and it will be interesting to see where she takes the show, and these characters.

Grade: B

Other thoughts/observations:

– there are moments where Girls tries to hard to speak to its audience, but the comment about a girl keeping her job because she knows Photoshop that rings true for any young writer. Being able to write website code is more valuable then being able to write the words that go in between it, and something many a writer struggles with in the modern age.

– I don’t want to draw out the race card, but why was the only black guy yelling crazy shit, and the only Asian girl good with computers? Yes, I understand the show is about one girl and her friends (who are all white), but the representation of NYC culturally – at least in the first half-hour – is lacking.

– interesting visual image: the refrigerator in their apartment is packed with magnets and photos on the top, and completely empty on the bottom. An interesting parallel between brain (the intellectual abilities of the women) and body (their general dissatisfaction with their sex lives and/or physical appearance). Might be an overly nerdy note, but it stood out to me.

What did you think of Girls? Excited for this new show, are wondering what all the critical hype was about? Leave your thoughts in the comments below, and stop by next Monday for a recap/review of the second episode!