GIRLS’ GIRL: Blogger Emma Koenig’s new show will be similar to “Girls” (inset). (
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Emma Koenig came of age at the right time.
Koenig, 24, sold her provocatively named Tumblr site, “F – – k! I’m in My Twenties,” as a 30-minute comedy series to NBC.
“I’m so crazy lucky because the person I am in real life suddenly became completely in vogue, which is insane,” she says.
Networks have started scooping up young female writers — like Koenig — who have captured new heroines: women just out of college, struggling to find work in their chosen fields, managing student loans and dealing with meaningful relationships.
Koenig’s is the latest “emerging adulthood” blog to be reborn as a comedy series.
Kelly Williams Brown’s “Adulting: How To Become a Grown-Up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps,” which will also be released in book form next spring, was just bought by J.J. Abrams and sold to Fox (TV title: just plain “Adulting”).
And Lauren Bachelis sold her Hollywood assistants blog to CBS, tentatively titled “20-Nothings” — to be directed and executive-produced by grown-up “Wonder Years” boy Fred Savage.
When Koenig initially conceived of “F – – k! I’m in my Twenties” in the summer of 2010, after graduating from NYU with a degree in drama, she wasn’t hopping on a new fad.
She was just looking for a way to channel her frustration as an expensively educated post-grad working in a sandwich shop and struggling to land gigs as an actress.
She originally envisioned a 25-page zine, replete with erotica and coloring book sections, “a silly workbook to circulate among friends to be like, you know, this sucks, we’re all freaking out, but hopefully we can laugh about it.”
In May 2011, she launched the blog, scanning in notebook pages of hand-drawn doodles, diagrams and cartoons at a friend’s office.
Its gimmicky design and theme of twenty-something angst appealed to the young readers well before Lena Dunham charmed broke and hapless new grads into watching HBO’s “Girls.”
Within a couple of months, Koenig’s blog had gone viral and, by the end of the summer, she had a deal for a book, which came out in August.
Dunham introduced the new archetypal young female — whose most telling characteristic seems to be a blend of shamelessness and candor about personal dysfunction.
It’s not surprising so many of these types developed their personas via blogging, the quintessential platform for over-sharing.
And Koenig gets this.
“I can totally acknowledge the irony that anything good that’s happened for me in my career happened because I was bitching and moaning about how unhappy I was,” she says.