There's been more bitter ink spilled by critics about Lena Dunham's Girls than any other television show in recent memory. It makes sense. Because she's a woman, Dunham is under enormous pressure; because she has an unfortunately rare opportunity to helm a series, her show must be everything to everyone.
But Girls can only be one show. And if you're familiar with her 2010 film Tiny Furniture and her project at large, the tight focus of her HBO series should come as no surprise. Still, people were angry when the show debuted last year. Now, with the second season premiering Sunday, the haters are coming back out to heckle and shout.
All of this is to say nothing of the blatantly sexist criticisms of the show and Dunham. Those people can just go fuck themselves.
Let's get into the deep ugly shit with The 25 Meanest Things Said About Girls.
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Written by Ross Scarano (@RossScarano)
"Girls reinforces every stereotype people my age believe about the kids coming up from behind."
"But the problem with Girls is that while the show reaches—and succeeds, in many ways—to show female characters that are not caricatures, it feels alienating, a party of four engineered to appeal to a very specific subset of the television viewing audience, when the show has the potential to be so much bigger than that."
"'Here's my butt!' seems like an apt tag line for this show, in all the good and bad ways possible."
"As annoying as the characters can be, they also evince recognizable traits in absurdly realistic situations."
"The fatal flaw in Girls is that it can't seem to settle on how best to augment its material's deafening familiarity."
"The backlash against the show has been mainly about the all-whiteness of the cast, the way there are no people of color in Lena Dunham's NYC except bit-part, background workers here and there. Personally I think people of color have dodged a bullet, and should celebrate their own non-representation in this TV-mumblecore hellscape."
"[The show's] launch was attended by a well-organized barrage of publicity announcing it as a new kind of television program, a generational shift, the work of an auteur. As though commercial television had been criminally ignoring the priorities and concerns of 23-to-28-year old female Fleet Foxes listeners all these years."
"Girls features four 20-something white gals who double up in apartments in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, dress in mismatched consignment-shop rags and moan about unplanned pregnancies, men who like to inflict bruises, and moms and daddies who refuse to pay the rent."
"And in keeping with [HBO's] niche-oriented model, [Girls,] will make a certain segment of the population desperate to scrape together $12 a month in order to keep pace with the adventures of Hannah and her spiritual sisters."
"The measure of success for the show is not so much these girls becoming Cinderella as a few hundred thousand viewers thinking, 'Yeah I did something like that once.'"
"I couldn't help but feel that Girls, like Dunham's back-end sex, may be helmed by a woman but backed by a man."
"Ever since HBO's Girls debuted this past spring, viewers have wracked their brains trying to identify precisely what about it they find slightly irritating and also which shades of nail polish best embody its characters."
"But for all the hopes and good press, the inaugural episodes of Girls amount to little more than inertia disguised as quirkiness, stock narrative masquerading as art, and peskiness paraded as high comedy."
"The television show Girls' producers wanted to telegraph a 'hip,' 'now,' 'downtown' sound for Brian Williams' penisless ex-boyfriend's band, which means they sound like Coldplay."
"You watch these scenes and other examples of the zeitgeist-y, early-20s heroines of Girls engaging in, recoiling from, mulling, and mourning sex, and you think: Gloria Steinem went to the barricades for this?"
"Girls is a television show about a 24-year-old girl who wants to write a book about herself and who is dating a 24(-ish?)-year-old Manic Pixie Dream Guy who is performing a play about himself. It is also a television show about the life of Laurie Simmons' daughter."
"Is sex always as unfun or awkward as it is on the show?"
"Critics are calling Dunham brave and revolutionary, but might it actually be braver, or more revolutionary, to portray sex as sometimes without dire consequence, or not totally absurd?"
"Let the record reflect that the television program Girls, which is 'like nothing else on TV,' and which has at long last brought the previously buried perspectives of 23- to 28-year-old females to bear on mass culture, has bravely broken yet another taboo by choosing to set its season finale at a surprise wedding. Nothing has ever been like that, on TV."
"The guy who brought the opium tea listens to Laurie Simmons' daughter complaining about not having a job and says, 'I'm sorry but watching this is like watching Clueless,' which is a thing someone must have actually said to Judd Apatow at some point."
"Girls is a television program about the children of wealthy famous people and shitty music and Facebook and how hard it is to know who you are and Thought Catalog and sexually transmitted diseases and the exhaustion of ceaselessly dramatizing your own life while posing as someone who understands the fundamental emptiness and narcissism of that very self-dramatization."
"Hipsters are really going to like this show. Which is to say that it is as profoundly bland as it is unstoppably irritating."
"Think: Sex and the City—for ugly people."
"A grateful nation of 20-somethings rejoices that, at long last, a television artist commensurate with their febrile desires has emerged to chronicle the granular reality of their collective generational life in all its window-fucking, ball-crushing glory."
"It's not every day in the TV world of anorexic actresses with fake boobs that a woman with giant thighs, a sloppy backside, and small breasts is compelled to show it all."
