WASHINGTON – Having begun my life as a performer, by way of decades of study and Broadway, it’s something that never leaves you. When the next half of your life is dedicated to the politics of sex and powerful girls, my preferred word for women regardless of age, and a breakout hit blasts into the entertainment stratosphere smashing the “Sex and the City” barrier, it’s going to get my attention.
“GIRLS,” which is hard to review on TMV because it’s way too blue, blasted out to receive varying reviews, most fixated on the bleached landscape of television that certainly didn’t start with ‘GIRLS.” Many just didn’t didn’t get it. It made Judd Apatow’s week.
“We wanted it,” he enthusiastically explained. “That’s the point of it, really. It’s supposed to be a comedy about women in New York who are really smart, but their lives are a mess. They know they should be doing great things, but they don’t know what it is, and they have kind of a feeling of self-entitlement about it. That’s the joke of the show.”
This week, Hannah, played by Lena Dunham, executive producer, director, writer of “GIRLS,” learned her boy toy Adam is a lying sack, as well as an insensitive jerk. As her old boyfriend informs her, there is no HPV test recommended for men, and that’s direct from the CDC, girls.
Marnie, played by Allison Williams, whose father is NBC’s Brian Williams, gets hit on by cocksure artist Booth “I’m a man and I know how to do things” Jonathan, who claims to be scary because of his manly man-ness, and she gets so turned on she can’t wait to rush into a public bathroom to pleasure herself. This comes after her boyfriend Charlie, who bores her to death in bed, shows up with a shaved head.
Jessa, played by Jemima Kirke, takes Carry’s “Sex and the City” sheer dress dramatics to new heights, then smokes pot with the dad of the kids she babysits.
Shoshanna, played by Zosia Mamet, tells Hannah that Jessa has HPV, too, and she says “all adventurous women do.” (psst…. They don’t.)
Shoshanna is also getting more comfortable with her shame of being a virgin, because she tells Hannah with a lot less drama. (Last week she admitted it for the first time to Marnie that developed into a unseemly, yet awkwardly hilarious, retort about puppies.)
Oh, and if you’ve ever been dumped by a gay boyfriend you’ll relate to Hannah even more.
But getting your bellyfat played with while you’re in bed with a skinny guy? Ugh.
It’s now been renewed.
As for the video at the top, it’s the music that played in the closing credits. They’ve got a sort of trend going that the ending music becomes part of the buzz of the show. After the second episode, requests for the group went viral.
Taylor Marsh is the author of The Hillary Effect, which is available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, where it was 1 of only 4 books in their NOOK Featured Authors Selection launch. Marsh is a veteran political analyst and commentator. She has written for The Hill, U.S. News & World Report, among others, and has been profiled in the Washington Post, The New Republic, and seen on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera Arabic, as well as on radio across the dial and on satellite, including the BBC. Marsh lives in the Washington, D.C. area. This column is cross posted from her new media blog.