HBO
If you liked laboured pseudo-insights on relationshits, the Kathy Lette approach to zingy one-liners, a face you would never grow tired of stamping on and vacuous self-consciously edgy subject matter then Sex and the City was the show for you, making you a fuckwit with less ability to maintain a coherent thought than Pete Doherty has to date a woman weighing more than three stone. Four such fuckwits, inspired by Sex and the Shitty to move to New York, comprise the core of Lena Dunham’s Girls. If premises were chemicals a gram of this would wipe out rush-hour Tokyo. But they are not just fuckwits, they’re rich fuckwits. In the first scene, aspiring writer Hannah (Dunham) gets taken out to dinner by her comfortably off academic parents and told they will no longer be bankrolling her stupidity. Like so many offspring of the affluent, Hannah’s New York odyssey has been funded by her folks and she doesn’t take the news well. The unpaid internship she has been working for two years will now have to transform into a paid position. You get that money girl and tell them what you’re worth!
“If you liked laboured pseudo-insights on relationshits, then Sex and the City was the show for you, making you a fuckwit with less ability to maintain a coherent thought than Pete Doherty has to date a woman weighing more than three stone.”
“‘I’m really going to miss your energy’ says her boss as he applies a sling to her hook, with the calculated insincerity of someone who’s seen a thousand girls like her.”Unfortunately for Hannah, her employers know what she’s worth: the square root of fuck all. “I’m really going to miss your energy” says her boss as he applies a sling to her hook, with the calculated insincerity of someone who’s seen a thousand girls like her – rich, deluded, replaceable in ways he can’t count. Welcome to the real world, chuck. It’s even colder than you think.
She takes her problems to Marnie (Allison Williams) her roomie and best friend. Marnie works in an art gallery and has a borefriend so eager to please her it makes her want to punch his stupid cloying annoying face in every time he gets all pussy claat around her which is EVERY time he’s around her. This girl hasn’t been fucked properly in a long time and certainly never will be by shit-for-brains. Hannah at least is getting fucked regularly by her on-off fuckbuddy Adam (Adam Driver) but to call it satisfying would be a stretch. When Hannah says he treats her heart “like monkey meat” she’s not kidding and their weird, semi-affectionate emotionally abusive codependency is as alarming as it is compelling.
“If you’re young, female, heterosexual and attractive and are trying but failing to get laid it is the equivalent of failing to score in a brothel with hundred dollar bills wrapped round your dong so Shoshana must be a special kind of hipster tard.”
Still at she’s getting some which is more than can be said for her pal Shoshana (Zosia Mamet, last seen as Peggy’s weird friend in Mad Men), a sparky wide-eyed all-American girl who rolled into New York hoping it could deliver the cock she never got at home. For Shoshana is a twentysomething virgin, and if you’re young, female, heterosexual and attractive and are trying but failing to get laid it is the equivalent of failing to score in a brothel with hundred dollar bills wrapped round your dong so Shoshana must be a special kind of hipster tard.
“Dunham exposes herself in a way that takes a powerful physical courage most of us lack. The criticisms of the show are petty and idiotic.”
Joining Shoshana in her flat is her smoking hot British cousin Jessa (Jemima Kirke). Narcissistic even by hippie chick standards Jessa is an artist/bohemian/traveller who seems perpetually angry about something but it’s never really clear what. Maybe a lifetime spent in the hot girl bubble where nothing she says or does has any consequence because chicks still want to be her and men still want to bang her has left her with that irritatingly barren feeling that arises when you get everything you want without question? That’s what my money is on.
So let’s get to it: why does Aerial Telly like Girls? Maybe it’s because he just “gets” the ladies? Maybe because more chicks have passed through his doors than a hen coop’s? Maybe because he’s seen more pumpum than Lee “Scratch” Perry? While that’s empirically true it’s not strictly relevant. Aerial Telly likes Girls because it is brave, bold, funny and smart. Dunham has a pitiless eye for rich girl delusion and is excoriating about her own physical and emotional shortcomings (she admits her role is at least semiautobiographical). That it deals with sex and relationships in an honest manner that allows you to sympathise with, even like these idiots is quite the achievement. Lena Dunham exposes herself in a way that takes a powerful physical courage most of us lack.¹ The criticisms of the show are petty and idiotic. This one’s a keeper.
The verdict on Girls: These few slags are alright.
Marks out of 10: 8
¹ Powerful physical courage most of YOU lack. Aerial Telly is an alpha wolf who takes shit from no one, knows no fear and will step to any human being living or dead.