“Girls” Slogs Along To A New Season
Whenever I want to feel proudly old and indubitably male, I watch five minutes of Lena Dunham‘s HBO series, “Girls,” which returns for a new season on Sunday, January 13. The general unattractiveness of these twentysomethings makes me proud I’m of an older generation, and the problems faced by the show’s women makes me relieved that I’m an aging guy. In other words, this show ain’t for me. Its general vibe was well-brushed by James Wolcott several months ago. To wit: ‘An attempt to create a rookie division in the “Sex and the City” genre (signaled by a Sex and the City poster in the premiere episode), “Girls” doesn’t cater to the shiny pretty richy-bitchy stick-figure expectations of a CW audience bred on “Gossip Girl” and the rebooted “90210”; it’s moored to the pokier manner and metabolism of its writer-director-star, Lena Dunham, whose low-budget, tightly enclosed, first-personal debut film, “Tiny Furniture,” made a critical splash that helped get her profiled in The New Yorker, which means we’re stuck with her. How you react to “Girls” will depend heavily on how you respond to Dunham as a screen presence. Some may find Dunham’s Hannah something of a slow load, passive, shapeless, and self-infantilizing, a clogged-sinus throwback to Rhoda Morgenstern’s sister Brenda, whom Julie Kavner played in the old Mary Tyler Moore Show spin-off.’
