[yasr_overall_rating]
A comedy about the experiences of a group of girls in their early 20s.
The end is near. As the 6th and final season approaches, I still find myself trying to decide whether I love or hate HBO’s/Lena Dunham’s “Girls.” The first season had me in stitches, it was fresh and funny in the most frivolous kinds of ways and it had its fingers on the pulse of a very particular and peculiar youthful America. Lena Dunham’s Hannah Horvath nearly had me hook, line, and sinker with her “voice of a generation” declaration. But after some space and time passed for the shock value to wear off, doubts set in. And of course, the frequent media bandwagon rituals of eviscerating Lena Dunham did not help. It is hard to not love to hate “Girls.” But is it really that bad? If I were a particular sort of culture crusader, perhaps. But I’m not and I can’t help but indulge myself. I love slinking into Dunham’s world of post-collegiate women, who are now nearing their late 20’s by Season 5, making lightness of the onslaught of poor choices that keep rolling in. Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, and Shoshanna were thick as thieves the first season and by the fifth, they are strangers who just know each other and are simply going through the motions for the propriety of friendship.
Season 5 starts out with all the girls gathered to celebrate Marnie’s (Allison Williams) union to the flaky Desi (Ebon Moss-Bachrach). These girls simply suck all the air out of the room. They are suffocating and choking on their own bullshit. Life is both hyper-real and simply imitation. Marnie repeats to herself, “This is my wedding day,” hoping that when she says the words that they’ll mean something, and she’ll feel something. It is obvious that this is all wrong, stodgy and stiff, a fragmented reality forced to fruition despite ominous omens. Everyone pulls it together, stepping gingerly into the future only to step out onto separate paths once again.
The fifth season takes on a more serious tone. You feel as if the girls have constant dark clouds over their heads screaming at them, “You’re too old for this shit!” And this time around it seems as though the message is seeping in. Hannah (Lena Dunham), who has been described repeatedly as “insufferable” and “narcissistic” is by the end of the season finally starting to shape up. She hits a milestone in maturity and you start to believe there is hope for her after all. Everyone is at a crossroads: Marnie snaps out of faux-marital bliss and follows her dreams with the ever-watchful and critical Ray (Alex Karpovsky) as her guard-dog, Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) comes into her own after an abysmal end to her Japanese-dream rendezvous, and Jessa (Jemima Kirke), the effervescent pixie dream girl with her shoulder-shrug attitude has been put through the wringer as she grapples with pulling herself together into a more “grounded” life with her loyalties being torturously tested. Her loyalties run fascinatingly deep and I am looking forward to seeing what happens to her character.
This season was solid, serious, but still pleasingly ridiculous. And it made me feel less guilty for liking it more than I generally like to admit. I started to care again and it felt good. While I do feel differing levels of love and disdain for each of the main characters and their wayward ways, Dunham’s “Girls” always pulls it together at the end. And I love how the support characters, although often wayward themselves, provide an opening for the voice of reason. Elijah (Andrew Rannells) and Hannah’s mother (Becky Ann Baker) wrapped this season up nicely with a few parting words on life as it stands for them: “I’m going to die having done nothing.” Depressing as those words are, you can’t help but laugh because you know how both serious and ludicrous they are, especially knowing that you have probably said something very similar, if not the exact same thing, fully aware that you’re full of shit and you’ll still get up in the morning ready to laugh and fight. And that’s exactly what you expect them to do the dawning of the Season 6. So here’s to Season 5 for helping us forget the lesser seasons and setting stages for the end on firm ground.
Available on Blu-ray & DVD Tuesday, January 3rd
