Image via Complex Original
There's been more bitter ink spilled by critics about Lena Dunham'sGirls 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."
Writer: Garrett Martin
Publication: Paste
When a reviewer invokes his age as a way to separate himself from a segment of the population, it's officially OK to ignore him.
"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."
Writer: Jenna Wortham
Publication: The Hairpin
What makes everyone think that Lena Dunham should be writing about women of color? What in her previous work or life experience suggests that she'd be the appropriate fit for that?
"'Here's my butt!' seems like an apt tag line for this show, in all the good and bad ways possible."
Writer: Halle Kiefer
Publication: Rolling Stone
What are the bad ways? Because it's not a butt you want to look at it? Keep in mind that even your conditioning has conditioning, so think harder about why you don't want to look at that butt. The butt is all.
"As annoying as the characters can be, they also evince recognizable traits in absurdly realistic situations."
Writer: Rob Owen
Publication: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"Recognizable traits" is perhaps the least human phrase you can use to describe human behavior. Guess Owen really loved the sweaty thumping.
"The fatal flaw in Girls is that it can't seem to settle on how best to augment its material's deafening familiarity."
Writer: Asawin Suebsaeng
Publication: Mother Jones
Suebsaeng, where else do you see privilege so thoroughly laid into? What shows are you watching that have made Girls such a "deafening" experience?
"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."
Writer: Eileen Jones
Publication: The Exiled
What a clever turn between sentences! It really got mean when you said "mumblecore."
"[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."
Writer: Andrea Peyser
Publication: New York Post
They have to mention the clothes. Is there a negative criticism of this show the New York Post has offered that doesn't touch upon the perceived physical ugliness of the characters?
"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."
Writer: Brian Lowry
Publication: Variety
And for his next trick, Lowry will attempt to turn the show's small focus into something resembling a problem—as if the fucking thing came with an opening announcement about how it would contain every human experience possible.
"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.'"
Writer: David Hinckley
Publication: New York Daily News
Different critic, same wizardry wherein tight focus becomes a crutch.
"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."
Writer: Linda Stasi
Publication: New York Post
The reviewer won't even credit Dunham to say she fails, and has to give it up for the man [in this case, Judd Apatow].
"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."
Writer: Caity Weaver
Publication: Gawker
OK, fine—the nail polish was not the move. But let the art stand independent of its marketing.
"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."
Writer: Asawin Suebsaeng
Publication: Mother Jones
You can't see past the hype. You sound like a dinosaur, but it's OK—watching TV in the age of the Internet is hard. Come back to Girls in a year when the dialogue has died down and try again.
"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."
Writer: John Cook
Publication: Gawker
Cook grabs at anything to piss on the show, including inspecting the thoughts of the suits. This is the Johnny Mnemonic school of media criticism.
"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?"
Writer: Frank Bruni
Publication: New York Times
And so Frank Bruni announces that he's too old to watch a program with real humping.
"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."
Writer: John Cook
Publication: Gawker
Seething against the nepotism behind the show isn't a valid way to react to the show itself.
"Is sex always as unfun or awkward as it is on the show?"
Writer: Katie Roiphe
Publication: Slate
For insight into Roiphe's views on sex, please see this piece from the New York Times, where she finds it in her heart to make light of rape. Thanks, Katie!
"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?"
Writer: Katie Roiphe
Publication: Slate
Or, to prove Roiphe's arguments, to have Dunham cry rape over some misguided feminist notion?
"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."
Writer: John Cook
Publication: Gawker
Just another critic who won't even let Dunham take credit for the show, and has to let the "blame" rest with a man.
"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."
Writer: John Cook
Publication: Gawker
Don't invoke Thought Catalog if you want your long-winded vitriol to reach anything but your own asshole.
"Hipsters are really going to like this show. Which is to say that it is as profoundly bland as it is unstoppably irritating."
Writer: Asawin Suebsaeng
Publication: Mother Jones
"Think: Sex and the City—for ugly people."
Writer: Andrea Peyser
Publication: New York Post
Because this wouldn't be a conversation about a female artist without a discussion of looks.
"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."
Writer: John Cook
Publication: Gawker
The show is a critique. And the loathing on display in this sentence isn't unlike the feeling Dunham directs at herself in her work.
