The older characters on “Sex and the City” lived in a fantasy world built around the fashion industry. (
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If your best friend slept with your ex-boyfriend who is now your gay roommate, would you be mad at her?
If you told your best friend that you had finally broken up with your longtime boyfriend, and while you knew it was for the best you were still sad, and then she basically ignored you, would you reconsider the friendship?
And if you discovered that your best friend was saying less than kind things about you to your other friends, would you hate her forever?
If these questions have no easy answers, it’s probably because female friendships are often full of complications and contradictions. In other words, girls put up with a lot of crap from each other while deciding if it’s worth it to be friends.
This is the territory that HBO’s “Girls” explores in earnest. The show’s candor often leaves you wondering why any of these characters still speak to each other.
“Girls” stars Lena Dunham as Hannah, an aspiring writer who rarely writes and seems to work even less, but who is not above letting her employed roommate pay her share of the rent. Hannah’s friends are similarly aimless: her fellow Oberlin graduate, uptight but beautiful Marnie (Allison Williams) lost her job at a Manhattan art gallery and is now working as a hostess; free-spirit Jessa (Jemima Kirke) impulsively married an ultra-rich venture capitalist; and naive but tough Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) is Jessa’s younger but more level-headed cousin.
If “Girls” is to “Sex and the City” what “Seinfeld” was to “Friends” -— that is, a darker take on a similar subject — then HBO’s critical darling is more a show about jealousy and rivalry than “Sex and the City” ever was. The latter show was a fantasy in which a woman whose only job was to write a weekly newspaper column could afford 40 pairs of Manolo Blahniks at $600 a pop, while “Girls” presents the bleaker view.
It’s no accident then that “Sex and the City” had a much wider viewership than “Girls.” The “SATC” series finale drew 10.6 million viewers. The “Girls” second-season premiere attracted a fraction of that audience: a mere 1.6 million viewers.
Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), the “Sex and the City” heroine, was self-absorbed and neurotic, but none of her friends called her on it. “Girls” is well aware of its characters’ narcissism; in fact, that’s one of the reasons the show is so subversively funny.
“ ‘Girls’ does show an ‘uglier’ side to friendship than more traditional sitcoms do, but it’s also designed and promoted as an uglier, messier kind of show, which leads, in part, to all the critical praise it has received,” says
J. Maureen Henderson, a marketing consultant who helps companies connect with 20-somethings, and works as a contributor to Forbes on millennials issues.
In fact, the girls frequently do things they know will hurt each other. Marnie, for example, tells Elijah (Andrew Rannells), Hannah’s now-gay ex-boyfriend, that “Hannah would be so mad if she found out you were bisexual,” but then proceeds to have sex with him, no matter how unsatisfying that sex ended up being.
“I don’t think either Hannah or Marnie are particularly ‘good’ friends,” says Dunham in an inside-the-episode video clip on hbo.com. “I think that Marnie has a lot invested in the idea that she’s a good friend and has a lot of rules about what that entails and Hannah feels really limited by that. By the same token, Hannah goes where she wants when she wants to, she doesn’t return calls; she flakes on people. They are both equally maddening and they aren’t looking at who the other really is. That struggle, to me, is a huge part of what the show is really about.”
While the characters on “Girls” do get on your nerves, they can share moments of love: when Marnie joins Hannah in her bedroom in an impromptu dance to Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own,” or when Jessa, melancholy after having just sabotaged her marriage, slips casually into the bathtub with Hannah.
“Lena Dunham is still exploring how to depict the complexity of female friendships,” says Wendy Widom, who blogs about “Girls” for Huffington Post and is president of the parenting Web site Families in the Loop. “At times she falters a bit, like when she has Marnie toss out multiple critiques of Hannah to their mutual friends over a few episodes. But at other moments you see the magic and transformative power of female friendships. Surprisingly, I find these relationships more interesting to watch than the foursome on ‘Sex and the City,’ a show I also loved.”
That bathtub scene ends up being as gross as it is touching, with Jessa “snot-rocketing” into the bathwater, but it captures the essence of the show: girls who are not quite ready to grow up.
“The characters are still caught up in those friendships you tend to fall into during college. They’re as much about convenience — taking the same classes, living in the same dorm — as they are about genuinely liking each other. I think Hannah and Marnie are struggling with that question right now,” says Henderson.