Two years ago, Lena Dunham was everyone's "It" girl when her show, Girls, first hit the small screen on HBO. The New York "chattering classes" could not get enough of her quirky persona, her HBO show that many felt reflected their own NYC experiences and her seemingly ubiquitous presence on Awards shows like the Globes, Emmeys and Grammys as well as social media sites like Twitter and Instagram. Cultural media sites like Slate, Vulture and Salon wrote so many articles about Dunham, her show and the meaning of being young in New York City that Dunham practically became a cottage industry for many sites. Contrarian sites like Gawker also got in on the Lena Dunham frenzy by attacking her regularly. (Gawker's recaps the first season regularly referred to Dunham as "Laurie Simmons daughter" to provide context for what they believed was a case of nepotism and privilege rather than actual talent.) This despite the fact, or perhaps because, the show seemed to be a celebration of the very culture that birthed media sites like Gawker.
I was always puzzled by the amount of coverage that Dunham and her show received that first year. I had to go to a lot film festivals during the oughts and often ended up seeing a lot of films from the New York mumblecore scene. Films where privileged young white people complained a lot about lives that 99% of the people on the face of the earth would consider to be very blessed and nothing much else happens other than the female leads taking their clothes off for no real reason that I could ever see. To me Dunham's TV show was the obvious descendant of those films and hardly revolutionary in any way. Perhaps the only real difference was that a young woman was the producer-writer and star and that she landed at HBO instead of playing a couple of weeks at the local art houses where America's seniors now go for a bit of titillation. (Seriously, I think the average age for "art house" viewership these days is about 82. No wonder they're all worried about the future. When I stopped into to see Greenberg a couple years back at my local Laemmle I tripped over three canes on the way to the bathroom!) As far as I was concerned Girls was a nice little show that showed some promise. Not unlike a lot of other HBO fare I had seen over the years.
Then came the second season of Girls. Suddenly there was a lot of hand wringing in the press about the direction of the show. Complaints came from all sides and even the ratings, never that good in the first place, started to decline. HBO talked a lot about how ratings didn't matter, and that the show had a lot of DVR and HBOGo viewership so the actual ratings did not tell the whole story. Still you could see that Girls was no longer the darling it was in it's first year.
This confused me to no end because in my opinion the show was just starting to get good. Oh, yeah. It still had problems. Lena's acting is hit and miss, Allison Williams will never be great or even very good and interesting moments often get rushed to keep the plot moving along in each episode. Still the issues Dunham and her show were investigating seemed fresher than the premiere season, the dialogue more real while in Adam, the character played by Adam Driver, Girls had not only the most compelling character on television, he's being played by the best young American actor working today.
Which brings us to Season Three of Girls, which has two episodes left to go. Not only are the ratings still soft, but sites like Slate and Salon, who couldn't get enough of Girls two years ago (Slate actually had eight, count 'em, eight, writers working on recaps for the show!), don't even recap the episodes anymore. They've moved on to talking non-stop about True Detective and the comeback of Matthew McConaughey or whether Hillary Clinton will/should run for the Presidency in 2016. In other words, the bloom is off the Lena Dunham rose.
Which is too bad because Ms. Dunham is doing some of her best work ever. She's still a bit wobbly as an actress, some of the B story-lines are not that interesting (was Jessa ever a fully formed character?), but the Hannah/Adam relationship that drives the show is full of the real complexities that any young couple will have go through. Especially now when both characters are having some success in their careers and the two of them are finding that situation much more problematic than when they were both failures. That's the kind of writing that takes real skill. Just watch any big budget Hollywood movie or show and you'll see what I mean. The characters in most television shows and in feature films are almost always cast in black and white. That's because it creates easy drama, it's easy to write and the audience always understands what is going on. Lena Dunham never took the easy way out with her characters and that is now beginning to pay off with episodes that are, rich complex and satisfying. She's also proving that the people who believed in her early promise were correct in their assessment of her skills. (That doesn't completely let you off the hook for This Is Forty, Mr. Apatow. But good work anyway.)
So where does that leave us? Can HBO get people back on board for a show they've seemingly already turned away from? Has Dunham been so overexposed that it will be hard to get people to take a fresh look? I don't know. But I hope so. She may not be "the voice of my generation", as her character Hannah so infamously stated in Girls first episode. I do, however, think she is "at least, a voice of a generation" which is the second half of the drunken spiel her character makes to her parents in that opening episode. That's the part everyone seems to forget.
HBO Girls Preview
I was always puzzled by the amount of coverage that Dunham and her show received that first year. I had to go to a lot film festivals during the oughts and often ended up seeing a lot of films from the New York mumblecore scene. Films where privileged young white people complained a lot about lives that 99% of the people on the face of the earth would consider to be very blessed and nothing much else happens other than the female leads taking their clothes off for no real reason that I could ever see. To me Dunham's TV show was the obvious descendant of those films and hardly revolutionary in any way. Perhaps the only real difference was that a young woman was the producer-writer and star and that she landed at HBO instead of playing a couple of weeks at the local art houses where America's seniors now go for a bit of titillation. (Seriously, I think the average age for "art house" viewership these days is about 82. No wonder they're all worried about the future. When I stopped into to see Greenberg a couple years back at my local Laemmle I tripped over three canes on the way to the bathroom!) As far as I was concerned Girls was a nice little show that showed some promise. Not unlike a lot of other HBO fare I had seen over the years.
Then came the second season of Girls. Suddenly there was a lot of hand wringing in the press about the direction of the show. Complaints came from all sides and even the ratings, never that good in the first place, started to decline. HBO talked a lot about how ratings didn't matter, and that the show had a lot of DVR and HBOGo viewership so the actual ratings did not tell the whole story. Still you could see that Girls was no longer the darling it was in it's first year.
This confused me to no end because in my opinion the show was just starting to get good. Oh, yeah. It still had problems. Lena's acting is hit and miss, Allison Williams will never be great or even very good and interesting moments often get rushed to keep the plot moving along in each episode. Still the issues Dunham and her show were investigating seemed fresher than the premiere season, the dialogue more real while in Adam, the character played by Adam Driver, Girls had not only the most compelling character on television, he's being played by the best young American actor working today.
Which brings us to Season Three of Girls, which has two episodes left to go. Not only are the ratings still soft, but sites like Slate and Salon, who couldn't get enough of Girls two years ago (Slate actually had eight, count 'em, eight, writers working on recaps for the show!), don't even recap the episodes anymore. They've moved on to talking non-stop about True Detective and the comeback of Matthew McConaughey or whether Hillary Clinton will/should run for the Presidency in 2016. In other words, the bloom is off the Lena Dunham rose.
Which is too bad because Ms. Dunham is doing some of her best work ever. She's still a bit wobbly as an actress, some of the B story-lines are not that interesting (was Jessa ever a fully formed character?), but the Hannah/Adam relationship that drives the show is full of the real complexities that any young couple will have go through. Especially now when both characters are having some success in their careers and the two of them are finding that situation much more problematic than when they were both failures. That's the kind of writing that takes real skill. Just watch any big budget Hollywood movie or show and you'll see what I mean. The characters in most television shows and in feature films are almost always cast in black and white. That's because it creates easy drama, it's easy to write and the audience always understands what is going on. Lena Dunham never took the easy way out with her characters and that is now beginning to pay off with episodes that are, rich complex and satisfying. She's also proving that the people who believed in her early promise were correct in their assessment of her skills. (That doesn't completely let you off the hook for This Is Forty, Mr. Apatow. But good work anyway.)
So where does that leave us? Can HBO get people back on board for a show they've seemingly already turned away from? Has Dunham been so overexposed that it will be hard to get people to take a fresh look? I don't know. But I hope so. She may not be "the voice of my generation", as her character Hannah so infamously stated in Girls first episode. I do, however, think she is "at least, a voice of a generation" which is the second half of the drunken spiel her character makes to her parents in that opening episode. That's the part everyone seems to forget.
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