Sex and the witty

HBO’s new comedy-drama Girls is coming to Sky Atlantic on 22 October.
First, let’s get the obvious comparison out of the way. The show is about four women living in New York: the writer, the responsible one, the highly sexual one, and the comically naïve one. Ring a bell? But these girls are younger, poorer, and live in Brooklyn. Hannah, the main character portrayed by the show’s writer and director Lena Dunham, does not have an endless array of highly covetable clothes and shoes that she’s supposedly able to afford by writing a weekly column. (In fact, at one point a male character going through her underwear drawer is excited to find a pair of crotchless knickers. Then he realises they simply have holes in them.) Instead, she has a mediocre dress sense, and when her parents cut her off at the beginning of the series, she is forced to quit her unpaid work experience and find a job. She has a Twitter account and a ‘quirky internet presence’ but these are evidently not enough to live off. However Hannah does have a Carrie-style on/off relationship with an unreliable douchebag which the show tries to force on us as an epic love story…
Girls isn’t pretending not to see these parallels though. Sex and the City gets a mention in the very first episode, because these twenty-something girls grew up watching it, and so did the show’s core audience. They’re just finding living, working and dating in New York to be quite a different experience.
But ‘Hipster Sex and the City’ is too simplistic a description. Because more than anything, these girls are real, and that is something you rarely see on television. You’ve met them in your lifetime, although you may not have liked them very much. You probably recognise a bit of yourself in at least one of them. But chances are, you won’t want to shout about that in the same way as SATC fans do. Personally I can see myself becoming Hannah after finishing my third year of uni, and it feels much like watching a train about to crash into something. Something like my hopes, dreams and notebooks.
The problem with a title as universal as Girls is that it’s nearly impossible for the show to live up to its name. Yes, the characters are girls, but it does not represent the experiences of all girls. They occupy a specific, if not uncommon, niche – the slightly clueless ones who feel a sense of entitlement because they’ve seemingly done everything right: gone to university, moved to New York, done work experience. Now where’s the book contract or dream job? And this group of people is captured almost flawlessly. The layer of glamour associated with living in a big city like NYC is carefully scrubbed off. And the idea that your twenties are the best years of your life is strongly challenged – the jobs are terrible, the sex is messy and awkward, the money is nonexistent and the mistakes are beyond stupid.
As comedies go, it is certainly far grittier than your average Friends episode and and that may be a problem if you’re hoping for a ton of laughs. I personally like my comedies cringeworthy and heartbreaking (give me The Office (the original, obviously) and Grandma’s House over a broad sitcom any day), so I’m enjoying the darkness Girls often ventures into. And it is immensely quotable. In the first episode. Hannah, like so many aspiring writers whose self-esteem is always swinging between extremes, ponders, ‘I think I may be the voice of my generation. Or a voice. Of a generation.’ And that’s what Girls is. A voice of a generation. One that rings very true.