Cheat To Win

Yet at the same time, those criticisms don’t particularly bother me. The show is too white and too upper-class, yes, but that’s a broad, systemic problem within the TV industry, and harping on this little-watched show as if it’s the standard-bearer in that department strikes me as a strange way to tackle that problem. (Even more bizarre are the still-lurking accusations of nepotism, as if HBO is throwing open its doors for every child of artist parents. If anything, the nepotism complaints are attempting to get at complaints about the skewing of the class system in America, but, again, that’s a problem that extends far beyond Girls.) And almost all of the other “flaws” I described above—except perhaps the show’s inability to know how to use its ensemble from time to time—are things that are so endemic to the series’ strengths that it seems impossible to separate them from what I love about it.

Todd VanDerWerff understands me and my views on television in a way that I will never be able to articulate.

“When a naked Hannah dribbled hot sauce all over herself in front of the doctor, shit in every corner of the office, cried, became angry with the doctor, had sex with the doctor, finished her burrito, had sex with the doctor again, shit herself again, and then realized who she was really angry at and sexually attracted to was Adam, I just closed my eyes and said, ‘Thank you.’ These are real girls with real bodies doing things that real girls do.” 

Source

Totally into this.

I’m so glad someone finally explained the episode the same way I saw it - you’re not supposed to assume it’s real.  And it’s not entirely clear that it’s a dream either.  It IS supposed to make you think, though…and if you were paying attention, it succeeded.

That’s “One Man’s Trash,” I think. I added that “I think” because being any more definitive than that would violate the spirit of the episode. You can’t “prove” what did or did not happen in “One Man’s Trash,” or say for certain how much of it occupies a place within the show’s established timeline of “real” characters and events. It does feel like an ellipse of some kind — or maybe a cul-de-sac from which Hannah emotionally escapes when the “relationship” goes to hell in a handbasket. (I love that mini-arc, by the way; it reminded me a little bit of that brilliant answering-machine sequence in Jon Favreau’s Swingers.) What’s happening in “One Man’s Trash” is “real” in the sense that it reflects Hannah’s personality, wants, needs, desires, and fears, and perhaps exposes an unpleasant part of herself that she’d otherwise deny. One “tell” that jumped out at me was Joshua’s vague account of the breakup of his marriage, which included what sounded like placeholder dialogue that Hannah would presumably fill in with real dialogue during revision (“ … real stuff that causes problems, and, uh, marriages to end”). Another is the scene where she makes him ask her to stay over and over and over, in different intonations, like an actor in a TV show produced by and starring Hannah Horvath. “I want you to stay” is one reading. “I don’t want to ever be without you” is another. They’re all so needy, and so fantastical, that they become a kind of verbal pornography, designed to give a secret princess an emotional orgasm.

Ricardo apparently thinks I’m Hannah.

Obviously I’m Marnie.

OK, so you look, like, totally gorgeous… as always… um, and very current. But I’m just wondering if it’s maybe, like, a little bit threatening… for babysitting…

Countdown begins now.

What’s up, human perfection?  How’s life?

Per Lena Dunham’s tweet: “Breaking news! Allison Williams goes insane, gives crew the finger!”

slaughterhouse90210:

“We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time. Something rare and wonderful. It’s almost historically unprecedented. We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius