Giving Up On 'Girls,' Again
I was dubious about Girls. I gave it a shot. It kind of didn't take, but I stuck with it. Then along came last night's episode, "One Man's Trash," which might as well have been called "Stop Watching, Tara Ariano." Fine! I will! After that, I have to.
"One Man's Trash" begins with Joshua (Patrick Wilson) coming into Grumpy's to lodge a complaint: someone has been leaving the coffee shop's garbage in his bins. He starts out being nice about it -- much nicer than I would be in the same situation -- but Ray (Alex Karpovsky) is such a combative dick about it that the situation escalates. Anyway, then Hannah (Lena Dunham) has to follow Joshua home, to his beautiful brownstone, and confess that someone has been leaving Grumpy's garbage in Joshua's bins, and that it is she, and that she's been doing it because she lost her dumpster key and didn't want to tell Ray. Then they have sex. What follows is probably as close as Girls will ever come to a bottle episode, as Joshua and Hannah skive off work and languidly hang around his beautiful brownstone. What seems like a potentially perfect situation for Hannah -- hot, successful guy; beautiful brownstone -- goes awry when Hannah has an epiphany/breakdown: she wants to be happy, like normal people do, and have a beautiful brownstone of her own someday. This ends the idyll for Joshua, who goes to work; Hannah has some toast, reads the paper, and then puts her own clothes back on and goes back to her life.
What finally made this episode the last straw for me was that it felt like fanfic. I know that's a weird thing to say about a show that Dunham created and that is at least somewhat autobiographical. But it's like she made herself a Mary Sue in her own show. The initial kiss is so abrupt; the progression from that to sex is astonishingly short. They don't even learn one another's names until afterward. I realize that my calling out this fact makes me seem like the Church Lady, which is not how I mean it. Like, I get it -- who doesn't want to have sex with Patrick Wilson? But when Tina Fey would cast Jon Hamm or Matt Damon as her alter ego's love interests on 30 Rock, she made sure to give them significant flaws so that watching their doomed romance was surprising, comical, and entertaining. But because Wilson's Joshua is perfect -- a grown-up, a doctor, and the owner of a beautiful brownstone (I forget if I mentioned that part), Hannah's time with him plays out like a wish-fulfillment fantasy.
But the epiphany is what pushed me away most aggressively. Hannah's idea of herself, she says, has depended on her doing self-destructive things for the sake of having the experience and turning it into revelatory writing. But realizing that she does want something as prosaic as happiness -- that she is, finally, no different from any normal person -- is upsetting because it means that she is not as interesting (by her own fucked-up standard) as she had thought. The only good part of the episode (for me) is that Joshua's reaction to her freaking out by this banal revelation is to be profoundly turned off. Whoops, he's just spent the day sexually servicing a tiresome child!
The critical approbation for this series, and for this admittedly risky episode in particular, is undeniable; I'm not going to sit here and say this show is worthless or anything crazy like that. But what put me off about this episode is the same attribute that made me swear off the show the first time: even if Hannah is not meant to be the hero of the show or admirable in basically any way -- and I'll stipulate to that -- that doesn't make her dumb decisions interesting to me. But I'm a lot closer to forty-two than twenty-four, so when HBO decides to make a show about a guy who lives in a beautiful brownstone, let me know.