Lena Dunham’s comedy about four women adrift in Brooklyn is sharp, unsparing and often uncomfortable to sit through, which is the point. Its world is small and the middle seasons wander, but the best episodes are as honest as television gets.
Hannah Horvath tells her parents, over the dinner at which they cut her off, that she thinks she may be the voice of her generation, or at least a voice of a generation. She is high when she says it. Lena Dunham, who created the series, writes and directs much of it and plays Hannah, spends six seasons and 62 episodes making sure we hear the joke and never quite lose sight of the ambition underneath. That is the whole method of Girls. It lets its four women be ridiculous and asks us to keep caring anyway.
It is very good, and we would put its best half-hours against any comedy of the past twenty years. It is also, for long stretches, hard to spend time with, and that is a description, not a complaint. The sex was what most critics remarked on at the time, and rightly, though not because there is a great deal of it. It is that Dunham and her directors, Jesse Peretz and Richard Shepard among them, shoot it the way the rest of the show is shot: in the same light, from the same middle distance, with nobody arranged to look good. We looked at the floor during the first scene between Hannah and Adam Sackler, and then realised we had never seen anything on television that was that accurate about what a bad arrangement between two people looks like from the inside.
Tim Ives photographs Brooklyn without a glow. The flats, dressed by production designer Judy Becker, have radiators, mismatched chairs and one good lamp, and they look rented rather than art-directed, which is harder than it sounds. Nat Sanders and Joi McMillon cut conversations so that the pause after a stupid remark runs a beat longer than is comfortable. Most comedies would cut to the reaction. This one stays on the person who said it.
Adam Driver is the discovery. Adam Sackler is written as the worst sort of boyfriend, unreachable and odd, and Driver plays him as a man who is simply concentrating on something else, so that when his attention does land on Hannah it is frightening in its completeness. Zosia Mamet takes Shoshanna, who could have been one joke about a girl who talks fast, and gives her a spine. Alex Karpovsky’s Ray Ploshansky, older than everyone and running a coffee shop he despises, is the show’s conscience and its most reliably funny man. Allison Williams has the hardest job: Marnie is vain and controlling, and Williams never once winks at us about it.
The scenes that got past our guard were the ones with the parents. Peter Scolari and Becky Ann Baker play Tad and Loreen Horvath as two decent people who have run out of ideas, and a late strand involving Tad, which we will not describe, moved us more than anything the four women do. That is a criticism of sorts. The show is more interested in the people around its heroines than it always admits.
The flaws are structural. The world is small: four white women with parents who can, if pressed, pay the rent, and the show’s occasional attempts to notice this are the least convincing things in it. The middle seasons wander. Marnie’s music career with Desi Harperin (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) is tiresome the first time and no better the third, and Jessa, whom Jemima Kirke plays with real charm, is sent on detours the writers plainly did not know how to end. Seasons of ten and twelve episodes, at 28 minutes each, should have no room for filler. Some of these do.
The best of Girls is in its standalone episodes, in which Hannah is shut in a room with one other person and the show becomes a small, exact two-hander. Several of these are directed by Richard Shepard, and they are where the writing, by Dunham with Jenni Konner and a staff that included Judd Apatow and Bruce Eric Kaplan, is at its plainest and most painful. Most critics rate the series about where we do, and we think the ones who found it merely coarse missed how carefully the coarseness is placed.
It is an 18 certificate and earns it in the first ten minutes. Watch a season at a time rather than the lot at once. These people are exhausting in the way real friends of that age are exhausting, and we liked them more with a week between visits.
