Girls is a critically acclaimed HBO show about the angst-ridden lives of four twenty-somethings living in New York. In many ways, it’s the younger generation’s version of Sex and the City, another critically acclaimed HBO show about the angst-ridden lives of three thirty-somethings and one forty-something, which aired from 1998 to 2004.
Girls, like Sex and the City, thrives on clever repartee among its characters about every situation in their lives. But there’s no gainsaying that, like Sex and the City, this show is really animated by characters talking about and engaging in sex.
The glaring difference, however, is that most of the sex-related stuff on Sex and the City revolved around a woman you could easily imagine posing as a Playboy centerfold; whereas most of it on Girls revolves around a woman you could easily imagine working as a plumber. If that’s not vivid enough for those of you who have never seen either show, think of a woman who looks like Sharon Stone playing this role on Sex and the City, and one who looks like Rosie O’Donnell playing it on Girls.
Actually, my allusion to Rosie is no accident. Because, given her liberated character in real life as well as that of the women she usually plays on TV (like the revenge sex-seeking Dawn Budge on FX’s Nip/Tuck), it’s probably easy to see Rosie playing this role on Girls (her homosexuality notwithstanding). And this would be especially so if the self-indulgent O’Donnell were the show’s creator and main star.
That said, I’ve watched several episodes of this show over the past two years. And it was interesting to watch its real creator and main star, Lena Dunham, give a much wider audience a taste of Girls on Saturday Night Live over the weekend – complete with skits featuring her naked body, naughty bits pixelated of course.
But her hosting gig on Saturday Night Live means that Girls is now a bona fide cultural phenomenon. Therefore, here’s my take:
Despite the invariably trite and “selfie” nature of its storylines, Girls is worthy of acclaim for featuring the naked body and sex life of a woman who looks like Rosie as if it were every bit as acceptable and titillating as that of a woman who looks like Sharon Stone. Period.
All the same, Dunham can be fairly accused of trying a little too hard – not only to show how proud she is of her naked body, with its Rubenesque curves, but also to demonstrate that fat girls enjoy and have lots of sex too.
In this sense, she’s rather like Miley Cyrus trying a little too hard – not only to show how far she’s moved on from her virginal Disney character, Hannah Montana, but also to demonstrate that she can be an even raunchier pop star than the likes of Rihanna, and even Madonna.
Surely Dunham has gotten enough look-at-me-now revenge on all of the skinny bitches who teased her, and popular boys who ignored her, growing up. Therefore, perhaps she’ll begin sharing naked scenes with her sexier co-stars (um, okay, in the Playboy sense) more evenly. I suspect viewers would really appreciate that.