Goodbye, 'Girls' *SPOILERS, OF COURSE*
HBOs Girls goes out as the one thing it always wanted to be: A good TV show
Source: WaPo, by Hank Stuever
On their last, long publicity lap, the cast and producers of HBOs Girls, which airs its final episode Sunday night after six seasons, stuck to a clear and unified message about the show: These were fictional characters, never meant to be likable and, anyhow, likability is an old and often sexist construct applied to female characters, an unfair burden in todays TV, which thrives on telling stories about difficult and morally shifty protagonists.
So if there were things you didnt like about Hannah Horvath (played by the shows creator, Lena Dunham), Marnie Michaels (Allison Williams), Shoshanna Shapiro (Zosia Mamet) or Jessa Johansson (Jemima Kirke), then that was the intent all along. They were never meant to speak for all millennials, or even most millennials who happen to live in New York. They werent supposed to represent a new feminism (or the old one). They werent role models. To talk about Girls from start to finish was to enter an odd conversation about what the characters arent and what the show isnt. Many viewers made peace with Girls by receiving it as a guide for how not to live, rather than how to live.
But for those still watching, the show has reached a sustainable tone as a work of entertainment and topical comment. It took the entire six seasons, but Girls is going out as the one thing it only ever wanted to be: a good TV show.
*****
What were seeing, at last, is that everyone gets to the shores of adulthood on their own schedule, in their own way, but parts of us remain forever vulnerable and unprepared for life. As seen last week in the series penultimate episode, Hannah is leaving the city to teach writing at a college upstate and raise her child as a single mom. Knowing everything we know about her (including her initial fast flameout in academia at the Iowa Writers Workshop), there are all sorts of reasons to imagine that it wont work out. The remarkable achievement of Girls is that we can now worry about Hannah rather than judge her.
Read it all at:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/hbos-girls-goes-out-as-the-one-thing-it-always-wanted-to-be-a-good-tv-show/2017/04/13/bf1bda9a-1fc0-11e7-a0a7-8b2a45e3dc84_story.html?utm_term=.e48ae8718057
Another 'jewel in the crown' for HBO - these four girls (and a couple guys) will be forever etched in our memories!