What girls want
"I don’t want to freak you out, but I think I may be the voice of my generation,” says Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham) to her parents in the first episode of HBO’s comedy Girls. The line is funny for a number of reasons. It’s funny because her claim is part of Hannah’s plea for her parents to support her financially for several more years so that she can write a book. It’s funny because that plea comes from a woman who is falling apart at her parents’ feet. It’s funny because it’s unabashedly egocentric. But it is not only funny; it might also be true.
Girls continues to get a lot of attention as a boundary-breaking comedy focused explicitly on gender. That attention comes in part from young adult viewers who recognize something of themselves in Hannah and her friends—Marnie, Jessa and Shoshanna—and in what HBO calls “a comic look at the assorted humiliations and rare triumphs of a group of girls in their mid-twenties.” Girls has gained two Golden Globes and an Emmy. Dunham—who is writer, producer, director and actress in the series—is smart and fearless.
But Hannah and friends are not navigating adult life very well. They get into an endless number of painful, embarrassing situations. The show is full of explicit and unpleasant sexual encounters.
