Skip to main content

The Daily Beast: "HBO's Girls is the Best New Show of 2012"

HBOā€™s Girls, which launches Sunday, is provocative, original, and addictive.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "HBO's Girls is the Best New Show of 2012," in which I (not surprisingly, given the headline), review HBO's Girls, from creator/writer/director/star/executive producer Lena Dunham (Tiny Furniture).

With her 2010 Sundance-darling film Tiny Furniture, Lena Dunham captured the malaise and uncertainty of a generation of postcollege 20-somethings with grit, humor, and painful realism, transforming Manhattan into a depressing playground for overeducated, underqualified youths in an economy that had seemingly forgotten about their existence.

Many of the same themesā€”and several of the same actorsā€”are transported from Dunhamā€™s accomplished indie film to HBOā€™s infectious and addictive Girls, the winking black comedy which begins Sunday evening, and which counts Dunham as creator, writer, director, and star (and one of the executive producers, along with Judd Apatow and Jenni Konner.) The show represents a major accomplishment for the woman at its helm, and, in the three episodes provided to press, the voice that Dunham shared in Tiny Furniture has been honed to perfection here, sharp and incisive, witty and brutal.

Dunham stars as Hannah Horvath, a would-be novelist and intern who is supported by her professor parents. She lives in a shabby walk-up with her best friend Marnie (Allison Williams, daughter of news anchor Brian), who works in an art gallery, has terrible sex with her lothario partner Adam (Adam Driver), and is more or less adrift. Hannah is not so much navel gazing, as navel obsessing, whether it is about being the ā€œvoice of [her] generationā€ (or ā€œa voice of a generationā€), the ā€œstuff that gets up around the sides of condoms,ā€ whether she has AIDS, or what she will do with her life.

She is, in other words, the archetypical 20-something existing in the increasingly deep chasm between adolescence and adulthood, and Dunham makes Hannah instantly charismatic and hilarious, willing to bare her body and her soul with the same ease.

Girls is, in many ways, the antithesis to HBOā€™s own ladies-in-Manhattan fantasy, Sex and the City, offering a far more realistic portrayal of sisterhood than that of Carrie Bradshaw and Co., though virginal student Shoshanna (Mad Menā€™s Zosia Mamet, daughter of playwright David) does have a SATC poster prominently displayed in her ā€œbachelorette pad,ā€ and she categorizes herself and other women by Sex and the City character types. But while Carrie and her kin moved effortlessly through high fashion and fabulous sex, Hannah and her friends live a decidedly less exuberant lifestyle.

Continue reading at The Daily Beast...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Have a Burning Question for Team Darlton, Matthew Fox, Evangeline Lilly, or Michael Emerson?

Lost fans: you don't have to make your way to the island via Ajira Airways in order to ask a question of the creative team or the series' stars. Televisionary is taking questions from fans to put to Lost 's executive producers/showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse and stars Matthew Fox ("Jack Shephard"), Evangeline Lilly ("Kate Austen"), and Michael Emerson ("Benjamin Linus") for a series of on-camera interviews taking place this weekend. If you have a specific question for any of the above producers or actors from Lost , please leave it in the comments section below . I'll be accepting questions until midnight PT tonight and, while I can't promise I'll be able to ask any specific inquiry due to the brevity of these on-camera interviews, I am looking for some insightful and thought-provoking questions to add to the mix. So who knows: your burning question might get asked after all.

What's Done is Done: The Eternal Struggle Between Good and Evil on the Season Finale of "Lost"

Every story begins with thread. It's up to the storyteller to determine just how much they need to parcel out, what pattern they're making, and when to cut it short and tie it off. With last night's penultimate season finale of Lost ("The Incident, Parts One and Two"), written by Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, we began to see the pattern that Lindelof and Cuse have been designing towards the last five seasons of this serpentine series. And it was only fitting that the two-hour finale, which pushes us on the road to the final season of Lost , should begin with thread, a loom, and a tapestry. Would Jack follow through on his plan to detonate the island and therefore reset their lives aboard Oceanic Flight 815 ? Why did Locke want to kill Jacob? What caused The Incident? What was in the box and just what lies in the shadow of the statue? We got the answers to these in a two-hour season finale that didn't quite pack the same emotional wallop of previous season ...

Comics "Authority" Warren Ellis to Pen Original Series for AMC Network

I was initially surprised when AMC announced late last year that they intended to enter into the original programming route, particularly scripted series. But my jaw dropped last night when I learned who was developing a show with the network: British writer Warren Ellis, better known to many as a god among comic writers. (Full disclosure: Yes, I am a comic geek.) For those of you not familiar with Warren Ellis or his outstanding body of work, he's an extremely prolific comics writer whose work touches upon sociopolitical commentary. Some of his best known works include "Planetary" (penciled by Joss Whedon 's "Astonishing X-Men" collaborator John Cassaday), "The Authority," "Global Frequency" (which had been developed by John Rogers of Kung Fu Monkey fame as a pilot for the WB two seasons ago), "Excalibur" (starring my favorite X-Man--along with Joss Whedon's--Kitty Pryde), and "Transmetropolitan." And if you, my...