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.” 

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I have the sudden overwhelming urge to make this my cover photo, but I love the current one so much, I can’t quite pull the trigger.

I think what I liked best about this season is that the characters haven’t really changed. They’ve been through life-changing experiences, and they’ve done stuff that seems like they had been changed, but when you get right down to it, the characters in the finale are the characters from the pilot. Yet now we know so much more about them that we have a better read on the situations they get into. We can see how much Hannah defeats herself and keeps herself from accomplishing her goals. We can see how Jessa’s impulsiveness gets her into situations she can’t easily bluff her way out of. We can see how Shoshanna’s relative innocence and naïveté keep buoying her up, rather than dragging her down. Of the four, only Marnie seems willing to embrace anything like change, as she takes an impulsive chance on the overweight officiant at the wedding, and that might have as much to do with her drunken, continued despair over Charlie as anything else.

Some might read this lack of change as a bad thing. Long-form narrative is supposed to be about characters growing toward something else and becoming more self-aware, right? And, yes, there are some series where that’s very much the case. Yet I think many of the best TV shows are about people who fundamentally don’t change, who remain more or less the same, yet continue to reveal new sides of themselves to us. They don’t change so much as our viewpoint on them does. I’d say Girls more than meets this challenge in its first season. We know these people better than we did in episode one, even if they’ve remained basically the same people. If you go back and watch that pilot, knowing what you know about the characters now, it’s obvious that Lena Dunham and her collaborators knew who these people were and were just letting us get to know them slowly. Someone like Adam—who was seen by many of us (including me) as a “bad guy” back in the early days—now plays completely differently, since we better know who he is. It’s a really tricky feat to pull off, but when it’s done, there’s nothing quite like it.

Todd VanDerWerff continues to knock it out of the park in his recaps for GIRLS.