I think this show is not very good for a number of reasons, but this criticism just seems way off the mark:
Girls, which Dunham writes and also stars in, premiered on HBO in April. Critics immediately heaped praise on the comedy for its voice and colorful storylines; The Hollywood Reporter’s Tim Goodman called the show “one of the most original, spot-on, no-missed-steps series in recent memory.” A New York Magazine cover story called the show revolutionary — and USA Today noted that “Dunham is clearly a talent to be reckoned with.”
But not everyone was so enamored. Within hours of Girls’ premiere on April 15, a backlash started growing online, with critics charging that the show is narcissistic, lacks racial diversity and showcases whiny, privileged millennials complaining about topics only relevant to whiny, privileged millennials.
Isn’t this show supposed to be based on her experiences? If she didn’t have multi-racial experiences to write about, is she supposed to just make shit up? And yes, they are all whiny, fwiw.
Comrade Mary
And remember those people on Seinfeld? What a mean, shallow, whiny bunch. Who would ever watch a show like that?
(I caught Girls by accident when I was down in the States recently in a hotel room with HBO. It’s flawed but has potential.)
Chris
I thought the same. I’m going to hazard a guess that it’s because the show has a title that represents a whole gender while the actual show excludes non-white women.
Forum Transmitted Disease
So, it’s like every other TV show, then?
Freddie deBoer
I don’t have HBO so I can’t judge. For me, the issue is never that people like Lena Dunham and Sophia Coppola can get their stories made into movies and shows. It’s that so few people who aren’t like them can. That’s why that whole Leslie Arfin debacle was so infuriating; the whole thing about Precious is that there’s almost no stories told from that viewpoint, whereas there’s always going to be more people telling the story of affluent white people struggling with adulthood.
eric
It should be culturally diverse like all of Woody Allen’s work….
Gromit
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
Not at all. Shows of this sort have historically focused on whiny, privileged boomers or gen-xers. I can see why critics are alarmed.
Zifnab
@eric: You mean the works where Woody Allen talks to Woody Allen about what a rough life Woody Allen has, and then he bangs a hot chick?
RyanayR
I think the show is totally terrible. Just, all around not entertaining, enlightening, or anything really. Just bad. I don’t care if people of color aren’t in it. The following from The Exiled sums up my opinion:
“Personally I think people of color have dodged a bullet, and should celebrate their own non-representation in this TV-mumblecore hellscape. While this show slimes along, I like to imagine the whole rest of mixed-race NYC having a terrific time everywhere that Lena Dunham and her friends are not, letting Dunhamites move around in a permanent bubble of privileged-white-girl malevolence, shunned by all decent people.”
And although the Seinfeld connection @1 is a good point, Seinfeld was actually funny.
Strandedvandal
There’s a certain percentage of the public that is going to find fault with absolutely anything. Their lives are not momentarily fulfilled unless they are heaping scorn upon something.
pragmatism
what teh french ever happened to celebrating viewpoints that don’t reflect one’s own viewpoint or their desired viewpoint? i see this a lot and usually ask why people are uncomfortable unless they are receiving validation. most common response: “i don’t know”.
Zandar
I watched the first two episodes to be fair and decided what the show needed most was a loaded cement truck dropped on the cast.
NYC in this economy should have been brutally Darwinian with these four.
It’s actually less pretentious than Veep, however.
eric
@Zifnab: yup, that one! plus, it is in a nearly all-white, clean NY of the upper ____ side.
Violet
Stories based on people’s experiences get changed all the time when they’re turned into TV shows or movies. Just because her experiences don’t include anyone outside of white people doesn’t mean they couldn’t have mixed it up a bit for TV. And yes, that’s making shit up, but that’s how it happens when a TV exec gets involved.
I saw about ten minutes of the show and thought it was dreary. Don’t see why people should care about those girls much at all.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Strandedvandal: I saw a review of the Avengers that complained that they didn’t use the nuclear warhead correctly.
ReflectedSky
@Freddie deBoer: Haven’t seen the show, but agree with Freddie. That’s what irks me. “Fresh” voice turns out to be voice of same privileged sub-group that controls the industry. Also, there’s still the assumption that young = better, even though that can’t be the HBO subscriber base. And whoever said the title was a problem — YES. Calling it “Rich White Neurotic Chicks,” sounds like it it would have both been more accurate, and funnier. Funny is good. (See Seinfeld.)
Strandedvandal
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): My neighbor was furious FURIOUS! that the physics for The Hulk were all wrong. There’s no way he could have thrown that tank by the barrel!
rammalamadingdong
It’s a bit of a stretch to believe that city dwellers don’t have multi-racial experiences, but whatever. TNC said it best
I’m not very interested in Lena Dunham reflecting the aspirations of people she may or may not know. I’m interested in her specific and individual vision; in that story she is aching to tell. If that vision is all-white, then so be it. I don’t think a story-teller can be guilted into making great characters.
Call me old fashion, but I believe in a beautiful black world unpremised on the random whims of rich white people. We exist–whether HBO adapts our stories or not.
PaminBB
I think the lack of diversity helps to illustrate how the world the characters reside in is small and sheltered. That said, I’m not certain that this illustration has been intentional.
ReflectedSky
One quick addition: NBC made Jerry Seinfeld add the Elaine character. Can you imagine that show without her?
I’m not saying Lena Dunham couldn’t make a show without PoC main characters, but given what it sounds like her focus is, it simply doesn’t sound all that daring. I do want more female voices on TV. But maybe more competent ones, from people who have lived more interesting lives (and/or have more talent).
Culture of Truth
Dreary, maybe. Game of Thrones and The Borgias are multiracial pick-me-ups?
Whatever Girls’ flaws, this seems like overbroad complaints.
RyanayR
Also, Gawker did a great article on this subject last month:
http://gawker.com/5903468/a-girls-writers-ironic-racism-and-other-white-people-problems
To cut to the chase:
jon
Saw one episode, decided not to strive to see another. Shit My Dad Says was a show. Why they greenlit First World Problems is a mystery.
My opinion: Meh.
Heard the last episode was good. Can’t say I’m the target demographic, but I’ll watch it on dvd later. It has potential. Can’t say I was hooked by The Wire’s first episode.
FlipYrWhig
@Comrade Mary: People DID complain about the neuroses, whining, and unsympathetic characters of _Seinfeld_. When they make the show-within-the-show, there are a bunch of jokes about how pointless it is and why anyone would watch it, and the series finale is all about how self-centered and unhelpful they all are. So to the extent that critics are nailing this show (which I haven’t seen), there’s not much hypocrisy there, because critics also nailed _Seinfeld_ for the same thing, and it almost didn’t survive its first season because of its cast of unpleasant people.
catclub
@Zifnab: Zelig was multicultural.
General Stuck
With the internet, Now you can start your own vitriolic mob backlash without leaving the house. And nothing will be spared, not mothers milk, nor teenage white girl angst.. There will be a mob for everything to protest about. Designer mobs, boutique mobs, even mobs to rent for your personal pet peeve. Mob retainers, and those for sale on Ebay
I shot my teevee in Reno, just to watch it die.
FlipYrWhig
@ReflectedSky: The pilot of Seinfeld has a female character: a diner waitress. That poor woman got Wally Pipped.
Martin
Um, aren’t we missing the larger point – that Girls doesn’t have token black people because we’re still good enough at self-segregating that most white people don’t have token black people in their lives? So the criticism isn’t that Girls is unrealistic, it’s that it is realistic, but we prefer Glee – white dominant power, with token black/gay/disabled/latino interspersed just to give it the right inclusive edge.
Gromit
@Strandedvandal:
I’ll back up your neighbor on this one. Hulk is massive, but not massive enough that the center of mass of him plus the tank would be over his feet. Even ridiculous comic book worlds need to follow some internal rules in order to help the audience suspend disbelief.
Gin & Tonic
I torrented the first episode of Girls just to see what all the hype was about. When I felt like yelling “shut the fuck up, already” at nearly every character through most of it I decided it wasn’t for me. Those people are *annoying* without being funny or entertaining.
ItinerantPedant
@Strandedvandal: Yes. They’re called Science Fiction fans.
kc
Brian Williams’s daughter is on the show. That’s reason enough to hate it, no?
Lurking Canadian
@Strandedvandal: My favourite complaint ever happened soon after the release of Fellowship of the Ring. The complainer was complaining about the scene in which Gandalf fights the Balrog, Gandalf, Balrog and sword all fall over the cliff and Gandalf catches up his sword to smite the Balrog.
My complainer just couldn’t get past how unbelievable it was that the wizard fell faster than the sword when both were in free fall. Because that’s the part of that scene that really requires suspension of disbelief.
kindness
Not watching Girls.
So….What do you think, did Littlefinger recognize Arya? I think he did.
Martin
@Gromit: Actually, my comic nerd friend explained that the Hulk is handled properly. Apparently the radiation thing that causes him to turn into the Hulk (and therefore gain mass) allows him to alter his mass as needed. If he needs to throw a tank by the barrel, he just makes himself more massive than the tank. Problem solved.
At least, that’s how he says its handled in the comics.
Tonybrown74
@RyanayR:
Maybe to white people …
j/k
But, seriously, I never thought that show was funny either.
Mark S.
Did Friends ever get criticized for this, cause that always struck me as the whitest show on earth.
I also loved how these baristas, part-time actors, and masseuses all had 1200 sq ft apartments in Manhattan.
Just Some Fuckhead
I’m pretty sure it doesn’t matter either way. Girls just wanna have fun, I’m reliably informed.
Xecky Gilchrist
showcases whiny, privileged millennials complaining about topics only relevant to whiny, privileged millennials.
God, I hope it wasn’t a GenXer writing this horseshit review. We got enough of that kind of crap from our elders that I hope my whole generation knows better than to shit on the young’uns.
Martin
@Mark S.: That was actually explained. It’s rent controlled – inherited from a relative I think.
Brachiator
The Gawker link has great background on this. The creator of the show lived in a multi racial environment, attended a multi racial school, and even supposedly had black friends.
And yet, somehow the TV show ended up being all white. Another post in the Gawker links is about a black woman who was approached by the studios who were interested in developing her blog into a TV series. But the wanted to have the main character played by a blonde.
TV and to a large extent movies still operate a form of racial apartheid. The fear is that if you have too many black characters, the show will become “urban” and be shunned by white viewers. The sweet spot is a show such as a cop show about an Irish family, giving the producers an easy out for a white only universe.
I wish I could quickly find a reference to a quirky Canadian comedy about life in LA. One of the episodes features an aspiring white actress who goes on an audition, only to find that they are casting for the “black best friend.”
Actors like to work and eat. And a lot of nonwhite actors end up sidelined as producers come up with new and exciting ways to rationalize the typical lack of diversity in these shows.
Citizen_X
@Gromit: Well, there’s that whole conservation-of-mass problem that the hulk has always had*, so it’s kind of nitpicking at this point.
*Not to mention keeping his shorts on when he grows 3X.
geg6
I only saw a couple of episodes so far, but I find it pretty true to life, if your life is one of a white, urban, middle-class, just-starting-out-in-the-career white woman in her early 20s.
The characters sound like every single early-20s single white girl I know. Which is a lot because I do, after all, work on a branch campus of a major university in an area in which only about 8% of the population is people of color and, I think, most of that 8% are in our residence hall. (I’m kidding, but not by much). Regardless, I know a LOT of early-20 something females. It is certainly a bit more realistic than Sex and the City ever was.
Mnemosyne
@Comrade Mary:
That’s exactly what I keep comparing it to when I watch it — it’s like “Curb Your Enthusiasm” on the East Coast, but Larry David is a 25-year-old woman.
It’s kind of funny how they can make all of these shows about overprivileged male douchebags that get praised to the skies (“Entourage,” I’m looking at you), but if a woman dares to make a show about the same kind of people in her own social circle (ie overprivileged white women), it’s OMG THE END OF FUCKING CIVILIZATION!!
Also, too, I suspect people don’t like that it’s actually somewhat realistic about the kinds of apartments these women would have and the kinds of neighborhoods they live in. They are NOT living in beautiful, sunny, spacious “Friends”-like apartments. They live in tiny, dingy, piece-of-crap apartments that they share with friends.
Personally, I like the show, but I like cringing in embarrassment for characters who just did something insanely stupid to wreck themselves. (Making rape jokes about the guy who wants to hire you for a job? Really?) If you don’t like that kind of comedy, you won’t like “Girls.”
Larryb
I knew there was a reason I never liked Seinfeld.
Violet
@Mark S.:
Yes it did. In one of the last seasons they hired an African American woman to be a love interest for one of the characters.
Strandedvandal
He was/is all worked up about a fictional mutant green comic book character, but completely nonplussed about his wife working through a separated shoulder because they can’t afford healthcare.
david mizner
Let me be among the first to say I like the show. To my surprise, I find the main character and creator appealing, very natural on screen, and much of the writing sharp. Young women behaving badly, or at least stupidly, having (funny-to-watch) bad sex with oblivious guys. (Yeah, that never happens.) Are the characters privileged and whitey-white-white? Yeah, as they are in a thousand TV shows and a thousand Judd Apatow movies. Ideally, the characters would show some awareness that they live in a cushy cocoon, but then I’m not sure that would be realistic.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/arts/television/hbos-girls-is-hardly-the-only-example-of-monochromatic-tv.html?adxnnl=1&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1336422598-lk/ZWoRZ/mXqDg3X7/BNng&gwh=D1EB5C317B09954682E8A89F032D38AA
James Gary
@Gromit
@Lurking Canadian:
…Hulk is massive, but not massive enough that the center of mass of him plus the tank would be over his feet. Even ridiculous comic book worlds need to follow some internal rules in order to help the audience suspend disbelief.
Since someone brought it up, the entirety of the King Kong remake felt incredibly awkward to me for this reason. When you increase the size of an object by a factor of x, then its surface area will increase in proportion to x squared and the volume will increase in proportion to x cubed. So then: normal 5-foot ape: 150 lbs; Kong (25-foot ape): 150 lbs x (125) 5 cubed = 18,750 lbs, or close to NINE AND A HALF DAMN TONS. The momentum of such a massive object is going to be physically very different from a normal-sized ape, and yet Kong interacted with his environment as if he were of normal ape size. This glaring oversight pretty much ruined the movie’s otherwise-excellent CG for me.
Also, I personally think “Girls” is pretty weak. Not because of any racial issues…I just find the writing, overall, incredibly hacky and predictable.
gene108
@Lurking Canadian:
That’s the stuff that’s bad. It’s like, when you see a movie and the hero’s escaping by swimming under water, through a tunnel and the whole thing takes 3-5 minutes.
I’m sorry, but only an expert swimmer can hold his/her breath for that long without drowning and cover that distance in time to not drown.
The people swimming aren’t expert swimmers.
In Cloverfield, there was a scene, where the characters went to check on a friend and ran up 60 flights of stairs and weren’t out of breath.
My older brother used to live on the 6th floor of a 7-story walk-up in NYC and when I was in college and just out of college and probably in the best shape of my life, I got out of breath after 4 floors. Climbing stares takes practice that can’t be simulated by running 5 miles every-other-day.
I’m sorry, but if I have to believe a monster is attacking NYC, I expect the other things to be realistic and not insult my intelligence.
****************
About Girls, I wonder what percentage of the complaints are from men?
From skimming comments on this thread and reading a few reviews, I think men can’t stand the show.
I wonder what the women think about it?
If it’s Sex in the City for millennials, it’ll have pretty much a white female audience, which is what Sex in the City based its success on.
bemused
I saw my first episode last night. Meh. I felt the same way about the Ben Stiller movie, Greenberg. Dreary, not funny.
david mizner
@Violet:
Same with West Wing: the criticism resulted in the creation of the Charlie character.
Violet
@Mnemosyne:
Sex and the City was praised and beloved and post-show two movies were made with the characters. Its main characters were white women.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Mnemosyne:
Maybe we could have one black extra killed each week, sorta like Kenny in Southpark.
david mizner
@Mnemosyne:
Right,
“It’s kind of funny how they can make all of these shows about overprivileged male douchebags that get praised to the skies (“Entourage,” I’m looking at you), but if a woman dares to make a show about the same kind of people in her own social circle (ie overprivileged white women), it’s OMG THE END OF FUCKING CIVILIZATION!!”
Maybe just maybe the real objection is something else.
Citizen_X
@Brachiator: That’s pretty damning.
The Other Chuck
It has to at least be better than Sex and the City. No idea why anyone raved over that show. Saying “orgasms” over and over doesn’t make you funny, it makes you a three year old with a favorite word that he doesn’t know what it means. And without the cuteness.
Mnemosyne
@RyanayR:
Ding ding ding. People don’t like that Dunham is laying reality bare (sometimes literally). Obviously, it’s never going to be a show that everyone loves, but it’s pretty obvious that for some critics it’s going to some uncomfortable places that they don’t want to have to think about.
david mizner
@david mizner:
I blew the blockquote. The last 2 grafs are part of the quote.
Matt in HB
@kindness:
I’m with you. Littlefinger recognized her. Having not read the books, I wait anxiously to see how he can capitalize on that little bit of information.
geg6
@Mnemosyne:
This.
@david mizner:
And this.
@gene108:
And especially this:
Most of the bitching I’ve seen has come from men. Duh. The show is not aimed at them. I have found it to be okay. I loved Sex and the City, but not because I thought it was documentary. I may end up loving Girls, too, for the same reasons.
Mouse Tolliver
@Mark S.:
Yes, it did. Newsradio even had Katherine do riff on the whiteness of NBC’s Must See lineup.
Just Some Fuckhead
ORGASM!
Violet
@bemused:
Oh, yeah. That movie was just kind of sad. I kept waiting for it to be funny but it just depressed me.
James Gary
People don’t like that Dunham is laying reality bare (sometimes literally)
The reality that many white women in their mid-20s from wealthy families are comically self-absorbed and generally clueless about life? My God, I had no idea. Dunham should get a Pulitzer for bringing this to light.
Mnemosyne
@Violet:
Name a second example, preferably one that was created by a woman and not a gay man as “Sex and the City” was.
(But you’re not going to be able to get me to defend SatC, because I wasn’t much of a fan.)
bemused
@Violet:
I felt sad and depressed for the characters in Greenberg. Girls had the same effect on me.
roc
It’s absolutely valid to say “these people are all the same, all annoying and I don’t care about their ‘problems’.” And isn’t remotely like saying “you need to run down the diversity checklist”. It means what it says.
*I* can’t keep them straight. *I* can’t relate. *I* don’t find them interesting.
People say the same thing about everything from The Big Bang Theory to daytime soaps.
Most times it just means the critic (or their readers) aren’t in the target market. And it’s largely irrelevant unless the desired market are the ones giving that reaction.
And even then, it’s not a condemnation of someone’s experiences for being illegitimate or too-rich or too-white. It’s just saying that someone doesn’t find them worth watching on TV. It’s really not a big deal.
geg6
@The Other Chuck:
Says someone who obviously never once watched the show. Hate to break your male privilege bubble, but there was more to the show than them saying “orgasm” over and over and over. And even if that was all there was, seems like you might have a little problem with some fictional women having too many orgasms and being too vocal about it.
Meh. You probably like Dr. Who or Entourage or Chuck or some other insipid male-oriented shows, so why should I care what you think?
liz
I’m squarely the demographic for this show – 25, underemployed, from a sort-of-upperish middle class family, and yes, this show is awful. And no, she’s not obligated to include minorities in her stories, but I am going to say that it is literally impossible for her life to be as whitewashed as it appears on the show, especially in New York where rich, snotty and lazy minorities are also easy to find.
Martin
@The Other Chuck: Actually it makes you a director who can finally make a show that includes the word ‘orgasm’ as part of dialogue. It’s like being the kids with braces for 5 years who spends the first week without them eating nothing but gum, simply because he can. And on that note.
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liz
@geg6: Trust me, most women hate it too. see: Jezebel.com
Keith
It’s original? It looks marginally different than what I expected the rumored “Sex and the City” to look like.
Walker
@Matt in HB:
Considering that this scene never happened in the books, so do the rest of us.
In fact A LOT of stuff last night was not in the book. They are starting to go way off script (while keeping the spirit).
Citizen Alan
@James Gary:
I am reminded of a running joke in the Atomic Robo comics series. The main character is a scientifically brilliant sentient robot who has pulp adventures from the 1920’s to the present day, and he is consistently infuriated by all the giant monsters who show up in flagrant violation of the inverse square law.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
Huh? Dunham is bravely investigating the exclusion of people of color by excluding people of color?
In a related vein, there is more outrage from fans of “The Hunger Games” over the casting of a black actor as the character Finnick. This stuff reminds me of the outrage when Tim Russ was cast as a Vulcan on Star Trek: Voyager, and the extent to which people vociferously argued about the ethnicity of imaginary characters.
Which brings me back around to:
Isn’t this why writers have imaginations, so they can make shit up?
alex milstein
I’m a 64 year old white male, married with two children in their 20s, and I have liked what I have seen of ‘Girls’ so far. In fact, it doesn’t seem that different from what young women (and many young men) went through in their early 20s, just out of college, in my era. Whether you come from a wealthy family or not, there is still a time of adjustment, especially if you’re not on a specific career path like medicine or law, etc. My first job in what would become my career was essentially as a go-fer at CBS News. That was 1972, and I made $100 a week…in Manhattan, where I lived in a dumpy west side one-room place that cost $125 a month. My friends (male and female) all whined about our lack of direction. That happens.
And somehow, I don’t remember ‘Sex and The City’ (which never interested me) facing the kind of criticism now hurled at ‘Girls,’ and that show not only had a long run but spawned two movies. Was there a lot of diversity there? And talk about a show about rich white people problems.
Mark S.
@Violet:
I must have stopped watching by then, cause I don’t remember that at all.
I remember finding Tom Selleck dating one of them kind of creepy, and wasn’t Bruce Willis on the show a few times for some reason?
Nutella
The reason critics are going off on this one TV show for not being representative of the entire female experience in the entire country is that they, well, expect one story about one specific set of characters to be representative of the entire female experience in the entire country.
Men are individuals, each with his own story. Women are women and are therefore required to represent all women.
You’ll find similar complaints about shows/novels whose protaganists aren’t white. They’re expected to represent their entire race, too, not just their own individual story.
Joe Buck
I haven’t seen this show, I don’t get HBO.
As for the “diversity” criticism, I think the real problem is that on TV, we regularly see young people in shows set in New York or California living almost-all-white lives at a time when that can’t be found in the real world. And yes, “Friends” was criticized for that (though the big whopper on that show was seeing people with crap jobs living in places that even the low half of the 1% couldn’t possibly afford).
The TV world is segregated; there are separate shows for people of color. Real life has people mixed together to a much greater extent.
Culture of Truth
He probably did recognize her, while making us think he didn’t, if only because it’s a better story if he did.
Martin
@alex milstein:
Well, it was 15 years ago when it started, and things change. But more than that, it was one of the first if not the first quality paid cable produced series. It’s hard to be critical of anything that is taking a big risk simply by existing. But these series are a lot more common now, and so there’s more room for people to be critical of them. That’s not necessarily fair, but that’s how its always been.
ruemara
Look, I loved Seinfeld, and liked Friends. But it’s pretty goddamn simple. How, THE FUCK, in FUCKING NEW YORK CITY, do you have a show with no FUCKING BLACKS OR LATINOS? Goddamn simple. It’s like having a show in Ireland and there’s no goddamn white Irish people. Capisce? It’s like the fucking amazing idea that a zombie show set in fucking ATLANTA GEORGIA has no FUCKING GODDAMN BLACK PEOPLE! Even as a subset of zombies, there’s less than 5. Also, whiny white rich bitches are annoying. See, also, My So-Called Life, which was detestable by me, beloved by my mostly white female peerage. YMMV. But blacks are just tired of being ignored by the only fucking people that get goddamn creative contracts. Fuck you.
In a general fuck you sort of way.
@Violet: Ayesha Tyler, the woman in competition with me as being the whitest damn black woman on the face of earth. She is also way too beautiful for Ross and way too awesome to have been on Friends.
liz
@Joe Buck: that’s very true, but the reason this show is getting much more heat is that it was purported to be more “REAL”
burnspbesq
@Mark S.:
They all lived in Granny’s rent-controlled apartment, and didn’t bother to tell the city that Granny was in a home in Florida.
RalfW
I’ve never been able to make it through an episode of Seinfeld. Too whiny.
Now, based on the non-stop parade of grievances on many RW blogs and many of the Fox Nooz shows, there does seem to be a big market for watching whiny white people run their mouths (or type the equivalent).
burnspbesq
@ruemara:
That’s actually quite easy. If you look at residential housing patterns, New York is one of the most segregated cities in America. Been in the West 70s lately?
Jebediah
@Citizen_X:
Pajama jeans!
Allan
If we’re going to attack fictional TV programs for a lack of diversity in their casts, could we start with Meet the Press?
Walker
@ruemara:
I went to college with Aisha, and knew her there. I still remember her going off on a rant over how she was never attracted to black guys.
nastybrutishntall
As post-Jim Crow generations, white Gen X’ers (me) and Millenials are the most racially sophisticated in American history. Shit, we came out in force and helped elect an African-American president. However, that doesn’t mean we’ve figured it all out. On the one hand, we’re not all having “Kill Whitey Parties” and acting like frat kids on acid. On the other hand, we want to sing along with our favorite hip hop acts but don’t know what to do when the N-bomb gets dropped. This has been gone over extensively by Chris Rock, Dave Chapelle, and others, but we still haven’t come to grips with where the points are on the spectrum of, on the one hand, respectful and perhaps overly cautious appreciation/emulation of AA art, on the other hand flat-out racism, with somewhere in the middle being good-intentioned but maybe still-offensive appropriation and stereotyping.
I could walk down the street singing “Peace Sucka N*gga” to myself and get beat up and it wouldn’t be right but still inevitable and still my fault.
Given the fuzzy boundaries, I’m not surprised Dunham chose not to make any of the choices required by having a black character, or a mixed-race character, or another kind of proiminent non-white character. As a white writer, how do you write that character in an authentic way? It’s tackled all the time, but I can see how a preoccupation with “authenticity” would make her shy away. Of course, by avoiding those choices, she made a choice, and created controversy regardless. But it’s a discussion we should be having.
Brachiator
@geg6:
I love the current iteration of Doctor Who, and think that show runner Steven Moffat has come up with some of the most interesting female characters in recent television. Who else could come up with a sword swinging Victorian era lesbian lizard, and her plucky woman assistant?
Never seen a full episode of Entourage and could never get into Chuck.
LynxSL
@Martin:
Better than nuttin.
liz
@Brachiator: “show runner Steven Moffat has come up with some of the most interesting female characters in recent television”
Wait, LOLOLOLOLOL, did you really just say that? Let me leave you with my favorite Steven Moffat quote:
“Interesting” female characters, sure, I’ll give you that. Google “Steven Moffat” and “sexist” though and you’ll have lots of fun finding a new way to look at those characters.
Just Some Fuckhead
The most segregated time in America is at 11AM on Sunday morning:
This Week.. and Face the Nation.
kindness
@Walker: Well, GOT is condensing multiple 1000 page books down into multiple seasons of 10 hours of show. Yea, there’s a bit of condensation going on. I was going to read the books after last years’s first season I found that I don’t have time for multiple 1000 page books….so I’m watching the show and wishing the episodes were 90 minutes or 2 hours so I could get more details.
Such is life.
Jamey
@eric: Hey, his last movie had French people in it, and just a few years ago, he made a whole movie about Spain.
James Gary
@alex milstein:
it doesn’t seem that different from what young women (and many young men) went through in their early 20s, just out of college, in my era. Whether you come from a wealthy family or not, there is still a time of adjustment…
No one’s saying the show’s not realistic. My own personal annoyance with “Girls” (and I dare say I speak for others) is with the critics’ response to it–a fair-to-middling show about Rich White People And Their Comical Neuroses is being praised to high heaven, apparently because it’s marginally more “edgy” than other stuff on the tube these days.
@nastybrutishntall:
Given the fuzzy boundaries, I’m not surprised Dunham chose not to make any of the choices required by having a black character, or a mixed-race character, or another kind of proiminent non-white character.
One thing about New York in 2012 is that a small but significant percentage of whiny well-off college-grad twenty-somethings like the ones depicted in “Girls” ARE non-white. I don’t think it would’ve been the huge leap you’re construing it to be.
Walker
@kindness:
Oh, I am okay with it. It is just that last night went way off script for what has been a fairly faithful adaptation so far.
Brachiator
@nastybrutishntall:
Shorter: dammit, we elected a black president; can’t we just go home and relax and watch white people on our teevees?
It’s a fuckin comedy show. What does authenticity have to do with anything?
Of course, it might help if the writing and production staff were more diverse. Ya know, like when women complain about not being hired on comedy staffs, and men reply that women are not funny or only write jokes about menstruation?
And again, consider the perspective of working actors and actresses. It’s insane to say, you’re very talented, but we can’t hire you because we are concerned that we would not be able to authentically portray your particular ethnic experience.
And I have yet to hear anyone who is not a Klansman be concerned whether white people are depicted authentically.
Sly
I suppose the one thing Girls has going for it is that the characters are not as transparently two-dimensional as the women on Sex and the City and the men on Entourage.
But I find that these characters and their world being marketed as “true-to-life” is entirely troubling. Either they are not true to life, as I suspect, in which Girls is just another example of TV writing that insults my intelligence, or they are real, and I have to grapple with the realization that all my early-20s misogyny that was directed at women in my age group was entirely justified. Imagining Girls as a genuine exposition makes me think I didn’t have enough contempt for women when I was a narcissistic 22 year old.
MariedeGournay
I have no sophisticated thoughts or social/aesthetic theories about the show. I just thought it was deathly dull.
Jenn
@Sly: wow. Fuck you.
Brachiator
@liz:
And isn’t that the point? I live in Southern California and have known a few people in show business. If I had to base my tv or movie viewing on what these people said, or on how they actually live their lives, as opposed to their work, I would be in a hell of a jam.
I watched the series 2 opener of Sherlock, written by Stephen Moffatt, then went back and ran across a Guardian review in which he was castigated for being a sexist because he made Irene Adler too sexy, subordinate to Moriarty, and not the absolute equal to Holmes. Didn’t matter that the part was a hell of a role for the actor Laura Pulver, and well done, and more than the reviewer was willing to admit.
And so what do we have here? Moffatt is a sexist who writes good roles for women. Dunham of Girls is a racist who can’t see past her whites only bubble. I think Moffatt comes out better here.
FlipYrWhig
@ruemara: I went to college with her.
Jamey
@gene108: Strangely, the late and only semi-lamented How to Make it in America depicted the more diverse demimonde that critics seem to want. Ben, a white Jewish kid and Cam, a Dominican-American, were besties in school and struggled to gain a foothold in the fashion biz. Nobody watched the show, despite it being enjoyable, if not at times a bit silly and cartoonish. HTMIA was pretty dead-on its depictions of LES night life and the whole Manhattan-Brooklyn Gen Y dichotomy. Also, it had severak scenes that recreated brilliantly the very stuff that makes living hand-to-mouth in NYC worth the trouble (bike riding in packs at night, ecstasy trips, hooking up at an after-hours party and making small-talk over blini, etc.).
Girls doesn’t inhabit that world. The four titular characters are kind of insular and totally self-absorbed; they enable each others’ dysfunction. Having come of age in the book publishing biz, I knew plenty of Manhattanites who “have a black friend” (or two) from work or school, but who seldom strayed far from their socioeconomic class. On this point, Girls is pretty on the mark. Lena Dunham is smart, talented, and fearless enough to hold her mirror up to that world. As others on this comment thread have noted, there are no non-white characters of note on the show be cause there are no non-white characters in the Girls girls’ world. I’m not a huge fan of the show, but I think it’s kind of ballsy of Lena Dunham to show that milieu. She hasn’t yet tried to make any of her characters likable or sympathetic.
FlipYrWhig
@Walker: Waitaminit, I guess I went to college with you too. Give a rouse!
Console
@Mnemosyne:
Meh, the Entourage guys are still relatable. Mostly because they don’t actually come from privilege. Entourage did a good job of playing up the “we’re just guys from Queens having a good time in Hollywood” angle, which made them easy to root for. They were whiny jerks with stupid problems, but they still felt more real than anyone else they encountered in Hollywood.
“Girls” feels more alien, like I’m looking at a really unique setting. No character really feels universal. But I’m a black guy in my late 20’s living in Texas. Maybe Girls SHOULD feel alien to me and that’s not a bad thing.
Even if I don’t necessarily agree that a lack of diversity hurts the show, I don’t mind the conversation though. You put too many black people on a show, and the show becomes a black show with a black audience. You make a show with nothing but white people and somehow it’s the natural order of things. But now it’s a bit different. The fact that it’s harder to justify white as being default is nice… even if it results in unfair criticism.
Darkrose
@nastybrutishntall:
Ah, yes…the old, “Well, I don’t know how to write people of color, so I’ll just pretend they don’t exist!” dodge
Newsflash: Brooklyn, where Girls is set, is full of annoying snobby black girls, and Asian girls, and Latinas. The “choices required” to write a character of color and exactly the same as the choices I make when I’m writing about rich white Air Force officers, or 2,000-year-old Roman Jewish vampires, or gay male British actors, or dark elf mages, or anyone who isn’t exactly like me: I choose to do my research. The “I don’t know how to write people not like me” things is a huge cop-out and a big warning sign of a lazy writer.
Anonymous for this comment
So, how many of the dudes complaining about how Girls is about whiny, self-absorbed women who aren’t funny loved High Fidelity? I’m sure there’s some reason why it totes different though.
Liz
@Brachiator: Considering Irene Adler in the original Sherlock story WAS equal to Sherlock and even often outwitted him, and in the show was on her knees about to die only to be saved at the last second by him, I’d say no, merely being interesting is NOT the point.
Walker
@FlipYrWhig:
Class of 93. Aisha was my freshman trip leader of all people.
FlipYrWhig
@Console: Entourage is a great example of an unwatchable show about irritating people having a grand time doing irritating things. And that main guy isn’t even attractive. His head has that odd shape most commonly seen atop the necks of Bil Keane’s _Family Circus_.
FlipYrWhig
@Walker: Aha. Class of 92, didn’t do a freshman trip because the guy I was supposed to head up with totaled his car the morning we were supposed to leave. I didn’t know Aisha Tyler but we had at least one friend in common.
Walker
If you are ’92, it should be your reunion this year too. Going?
I am undecided. My wife is learning to be a Cesna pilot and it is a good hop from Central New York. But that means my attendance depends on weather.
Console
@FlipYrWhig:
I haven’t watched Entourage since the middle of season 3, but the first two seasons are hilarious.
FlipYrWhig
@Walker: Nah, I’m bagging it. None of my better friends from then are planning to go either. OTOH, I met my wife there so every day is like a mini-reunion. [Awww!]
ETA: Also I’m in Southeast Virginia now and that’s a trek.
Hungry Joe
I haven’t seen “Girls,” but it seems like it’s being made to answer for a lot. Wouldn’t it be more valid to criticize American television, in general, for a lack of diversity, than to leap on one new show and beat it to death? The most important (though surely not the only) question about this (or maybe, any) one show is, “Is it any good?” Sure, point out its dearth of, say, Puerto Rican characters, as yet another example … but in the end, is it any good?
FlipYrWhig
@Console: Eh, I just find the people too unpleasant and too pleased with themselves, and I feel like I’m supposed to root for them, but I just don’t. I like my unpleasant people a little more anarchic, like Ricky Gervais and Larry David. I’m not surprised that there haven’t been many examples of “cringe comedy” with women stars.
ruemara
@burnspbesq: Dude. I’ve lived all over Manhattan and in Queens since 4ever. WE FUCKING EXIST EVEN IN THE 70’s. Step outside. Black people. QED. asshole.
@Jamey: When you show them reality, they prefer the sham.
Mnemosyne
@Console:
Not to me. At all. I really think that was one of those “guy thing” shows, because I couldn’t watch more than 5 minutes without wanting to projectile vomit. There was nothing interesting, funny, or relatable about a single one of those guys for me.
That’s why I get so annoyed with the people who defended “Entourage” but are attacking “Girls” with everything they have. Do they really not realize how stupid and alienating to most women their own favorite show was? In the year 2012, is it really so awful to dare to have a show on the air that reminds women of their own douchebag days?
Merp
For pete’s sake. This is ridiculous.
Girls is racially problematic not only because it is unbelievably and distractingly lily-white in a way that goes against the life experience of its creator (which is bad, but kinda quasi defensible on an artistic and comaparative-to-other-shows-of-its-ilk level) but also because minorities aren’t even in the background of the show for the most part and mainly because the portrayal of and jokes involving minorities are incredibly tone-deaf.
Minorities are there for the white people to get jokes from and make jokes at the expense of. The jokes are made from a place of sneering obliviousness about minorities and minority experience which the show itself is complicit in (it reduces that stance in one scene, see below, but only slightly). Hannah’s minority coworkers are lower-class, tacky, dumb. Jokes chastising white dudes for chasing asian women and saying “that black lady spent so much on her hair but it still looks bad, it’s unbeweaveable, I got that joke from Jerry Springer” just can’t be defended.
The one moment which goes against all this somewhat is when one of the girls, who can tell which one, is babysitting some kids in a park and meets some older minority nannies and the rich white girl is all “man we have it so tough” and the older minority nannies roll their eyes. Which, ok, good. But the portrayal of the minorities is still stereotypical, and there’s still a magical negro thing going on because the nannies are also all “oh my you are so beautiful”, and the interaction between the nannies and the rich white girl is entirely geared toward helping the rich white girl along on her journey of self discovery and self realization. A show which actually gave a shit about people who weren’t rich white people would find ways to portray minorities as actual people instead of props which help progress the rich white girls lives.
Someone upthread complained about “well Larry David can act all obnoxious without minority friends why can’t Lena Dunham they’re both LDs”. The difference is the portrayal of minorities on Curb Your Enthusiasm is completely different than on Girls. Minorities on Curb have concerns, desires, emotions, lives. They’re people. From the first season when LD insults a black doctor to when the Blacks take up residence in his house, from the minorities which act like everybody else to minorities who respond to racial issues, from the ones which barely talk to the ones which get nearly as much screen time as David himself.
Plus in general, and this is just a pet peeve of mine, is there any dialogue in Girls that’s funny? At any point? It’s useful to compare Girls to Veep, which is also just getting started on HBO. Veep has differentiated about six different main characters from each other, given the more central ones a little personality drama, the plots revolve around these differentiable characters interacting with each other. And it’s funny! Even if you don’t like the show, if you’ve watched all three there has been more than one point during each episode where you audibly laughed, right?
Whereas Girls has four main characters that are hard to tell apart, with plots that rely on exogenous shocks to their lives (HPV! Kids getting lost!). And it’s not funny. And it has problems with race independent of the typical problems of race these shows have.
(And just to vent here, to the earlier commenter who said Veep was pretentious: pretentious about what? There’s no pretension that the concerns of the characters are about anything besides their own interests. There’s no pretension that they’re doing anything important, or are acting virtuously, or are doing yeoman’s work under pressure/time/information constraints. Like a certain other show set in a certain wing in a certain cardinal direction. They could be selling farm equipment as part of the second biggest farm equipment firm in North Dakota and not much would change.)
In conclusion, TV is a land of contrasts. Girls bad, Veep good.
Liz
@Mnemosyne: Ari is one of my favorite television characters ever. But Vince and his band of Merry Douchebags were insufferable.
Mnemosyne
@ruemara:
You have it set in a very small, insular social circle where you pretty much only see four women and the men they’re sleeping with/want to sleep with. So far, it’s an extremely tiny world.
Though I will say, for all of its faults, one thing that “Seinfeld” did very well (IMO) was to put a lot of non-white people in background or supporting roles, so while the four leads were white, they moved in a world filled with black lawyers, Indian cabdrivers, Arab (?) soup vendors, etc. That’s really what “Girls” is missing right now, IMO — that sense of a larger world that the characters are moving through that contains all of those other people with their own stories. Right now, it’s very cloistered, in a weird way, like they picked up their dorm lives from college and plopped them down into the middle of NYC.
Also, too, since some people seem to be confused, it was NOT Lena Dunham who made the stupid tweet. It was one of the show’s staff writers, Lesley Arfin.
gwangung
Most often, they get turned from stories starring people of color to stories starring white people.
James Gary
@Jamey:
Just FYI, I LOVED “How To Make It In America” (despite the extremely uneven writing) for the features you mentioned and was really bummed when it didn’t get renewed for a third season. That show really had some kind of indefinable heart to it.
FlipYrWhig
@Mnemosyne: I’m not sure Seinfeld started out with a particular commitment to diversity. I was flipping through a list of episodes and it looks mighty white — assuming we’re counting Jewish people as white — until the episode with the fired busboy late in Season 2.
Mnemosyne
@Merp:
Hannah has co-workers? I haven’t seen the most recent episode yet. Last I saw, she joked about the guy interviewing her being a rapist and (understandably for normal person) didn’t get the job, so she was still unemployed.
I don’t disagree with you about them doing a very bad job of giving a sense of the city as a whole (see my comment above), but I’m not sure why people are upset that a show about unpleasant people who we enjoy seeing humiliated also involves having those unpleasant people be shown as casually racist. As far as I can tell, that’s supposed to be yet another mark against them, not some kind of redeeming quality.
Darkrose
@gwangung:
+1
I’ve been watching “Legend of Korra”, and every episode, I keep thinking, “How could anyone argue that this isn’t totally Asian?” And yet, somehow, MNS managed.
Mnemosyne
@gwangung:
For example, the movie version of 21, where a team that was almost entirely Asian-American and Arab-American were turned into white kids.
ruemara
@Mnemosyne: Again: We. Are. Outside. It’s NY. And we’re hardly ever in the background. Why is that not understood? I know racial insularity. I went to IS 92 and NYU and CCNY. It’s hardly strange that you can live your entire life even in NYC and not really develop close relations with other racial groups. But you don’t ever, ever not see them around. And the show was notable because even secondary and background casting was as lily white as possible. It was notable in Friends and Girls is the same.
Console
@Mnemosyne:
I dunno. I think Weeds has just as many contemptible people, but it’s a successful show. I think it’s all about the juxtaposition. Like I said, the guys on Entourage are bad, but compared to what? They’re surrounded by even bigger narcissists and fuck ups. On Weeds, the Botwin family has gone off the deep end, but who else on the show is worth emulating?
Girls doesn’t have that larger context for me. I find the show to be decently funny, but it doesn’t have that anchor for me to watch other than to hear whatever random one-liner is going to be said.
Mnemosyne
@ruemara:
That is understood. That’s why my entire second paragraph in the comment you’re responding to is about that exact issue and says that I think “Girls” needs to do better with that. Apparently Lena Dunham agrees that it’s a problem, is embarrassed that she didn’t realize it sooner, and says she will fix it next season since this season is already completed. So what are we arguing about, again?
nastybrutishntall
@Brachiator: even shorter brachiator: I like to read the first two sentences of everything and just riff on it because fuck reading! also, fuck you AND John Wayne.
MGB
@FlipYrWhig: Hello random D alums. Class of 99 mostly lurker here. Oh yeah this was a totally OT aside.
FlipYrWhig
@MGB: w00t Granite in our brains!
nastybrutishntall
@Darkrose: I’m not saying it’s the most artistically courageous stance. I just don’t think it’s an evil one. Imagine the discussion we’d be having if she had a narcissistic Buppie friend who hated ghetto shit and made fun of poor black people all the time. We’d be talking about how Dunham’s a racist. See, the conversation is always the same. No black people? Racist. Black people? Racist! Me talking about this? Racist! Me not talking about this? Racist! It’s an ouroborous of suffocating stupidity that consumes our whole culture. I suppose I should have posted this at TNC’s blog, where people actually know how to discuss race without being obnoxious dickheads. Even though I have a softspot for obnoxious dickheads, being one myself.
Merp
@Mnemosyne:
It’d be great if the show itself was holding up its characters casual “hipster” racism or whatever as something to be condemned. I’d be really interested in explorations of that, because I find jokes in that vein pretty funny but recognize that it’s a complex thing and I’m not entirely comfortable with it even as I’m laughing at it or making the jokes myself.
But that’s not what Girls does. There’s no indication that when the characters jokingly chastise white dudes for going after asian girls the show itself is condemning them, fer instance.
And the most troubling parts can’t be waived away with “well they’re just showing how unpleasant / dumb the rich white girls are”. Hannah’s coworkers (who yes are new; if you’ve seen previews for the episode you may have seen Hannah having problems with her new boss) are sneered at by the show itself; by their characterization, their dialogue, etc. The minority nannies that one of the girls meets while babysitting embody several just troglodytic stereotypes. Etc.
The only way to save that kind of stuff with your argument is to say that the entirety of the show is portrayed through the subjective frame of these rich white girls. Ie, they are not actually this pretty, don’t actually have this sense of style, aren’t actually this witty, don’t actually hang out with / sleep with dudes that are this scummy or awesome or handsome. The weather isn’t actually this dreary, or this sunny. Their apartments aren’t actually this cramped. And the minorities in actuality don’t act this stereotypically, and their interactions with the rich white girls don’t actually revolve around fulfilling or enabling the lives of the rich white girls. All this stuff is just the perception these girls have as they go through their lives. Sort of like L’Avventura: The TV Show.
Which would be just beyond awesome, if a show did that. I just don’t see any evidence for this show doing that, or why we should interpret this show as doing that.
ruemara
@Mnemosyne: Mea culpa. Part of it is that people seem to think that calls for inclusion mean, “introduce a black person into the cast” and act as if there is no problem due to the realities of segregation in a metropolis like NY.
Patricia Kayden
@Brachiator: I would love to find out who the Black female blogger was in your post. And it is interesting that Dunham had Black friends and lived in a multi-racial environment but chose to produce an all-White show.
David Koch
there’s no blacks on that show?
oh, thank goodness.
for a moment I thought my tee vee was broke and wasn’t broadcasting color, but now you say that was intentional.
phew. saves me a trip to the repair shop.
the fugitive uterus
i find nonfiction far more interesting. real life is stranger than fiction. and no, that does not include reality shows! but that makes me wonder if life in America really is just turning into some kind of reality show.
but there’s also a different type of reality now. nearly everything about the primary OWS movements, has been broadcast, streamed and/or recorded by someone. what could be more compelling?
and then i feel like Tampa is going to be like some kind of powder keg. am i overreacting?
or Charlotte for that matter
Young Buck
@Comrade Mary:
Seinfeld is the same sorry ass story line as GIRLS, IMO. Whiny a$$ privileged white people doing neurotic dumb stuff, that sometime is funny. I didn’t like it the first time around as Seinfeld and I don’t like it now. But really I just can’t stand the idea of a show in Brooklyn without half the cast not only being black but having dreadlocks.
Sgaile-beairt
@ruemara: I live in a town that as of, last census, was 96% white in one of the whiter neighborhoods no less. There is a Spanish grocery 2 blocks from my place. I literally cannot walk to the corner store or the park at the end of the street & back with out seeing, greeting, neighbors from PR, Trinidad, Sudan, Nepal, you name it. If I couldnt film a DIY documentary of a bike ride around the block with a camcorder and not have plenty of people not all WASPs interacting on the disk then how can it be “realistic” to do it in NYC? or LA?
Young Buck
@eric: Win!
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
every time i have tried to watch it, admittedly only a scene or two here and there, i couldn’t help the sensation of having a cheese grater running up and down my back.
in particular, and admittedly out of order, a scene where one of the women is accusing her ex(apparently) of putting on gay affectations he didn’t have when they were dating or whatever.
i don’t know how real, or hyperreal, or how true or representative it is, but it isn’t relatable or aspirational for me, personally. if others like it, so be it. premium cable has a problem marketing to people under 35.
rea
Gandalf isn’t human. He has magic powers. He has a magic sword, with magic powers of its own. That’s how he retrieves the sword–it’s not a matter of two objects in freefall falling at the same rate of speed. It’s magic.
And if you can’t suspend your disbelief enough to allow for some magic–well, LOTR is not for you.
Merp
And it’s not like it’s integral to the scene or anything. It’s just something they thought would look cool. After that fall Gandalf fights the Balthing up and down and through all kinds of terrain until he finally beats him on top of that tall snowy peak. Complaining about an epiphenomenal special effect is pretty silly. On top of it being magic.
Dilbatt
It’s totally unwarranted criticism. The show is good, but not yet great. Lena Dunham is astonishingly talented at 25yrs. She’s writing and directing many of these episodes. Sounds like jealousy at work to me.
Narcissus
God forbid the Boomers have to find something not about them.
Heliopause
Haven’t seen the show but I can accept this criticism as perfectly accurate and, so what? I mean, hell, not like about half of television isn’t people whining about their pathetic non-problems. At least half. In fact, once you remove news, sports, and PBS documentaries pretty much all of television is goddamned whining. And even those three are sometimes a bunch of whining. So, go for it, Girls, join the all-American pity party.
Gromit
@Citizen_X:
Conservation of mass isn’t such a hard-and-fast law that you can’t get around it given enough mumbo jumbo, especially in a genre in which science is basically a stand-in for magic. But when your photorealistic CG character moves like a cartoon, that’s a problem (see also, Yoda in “Attack of the Clones”). The audience’s perception of weight is critically important in making animation believable. So Hulk can grow massive without the audience batting an eye, but if he moves like he is either significantly more or significantly less massive than the audience perceives that he should be, the illusion is broken. All this is to say, the tank bit (and some other parts) of the movie bugged me. Not that that was anything close to the biggest problem with the movie.
Marc
Y’know, it is true that sometimes people who are not the target audience may not get something. It’s also sometimes true that this can be an excuse for substandard art, and that people aren’t getting any favors for that. I’d be interested therefore in hearing about something like Girls, because sometimes they can transcend genre (or be really important to the proper audience. e.g. Harry Potter). But the “x can have no valid opinion on y” line of argument comes from a place of insecurity, not strength.
One of the beautiful things about NYC is how cosmopolitan it is, and always has been. You may move in a monochrome social circle, but on the street (and in the subway, and in public in general) the city is really diverse. You especially notice it if you come from a city like mine, where you can move in an overwhelmingly white set of surroundings most of the time. So the diversity critique may well make for not just a better show but a more real one.
BobS
@Merp: Veep is just another sitcom. Funnier than most, and with a lot more swearing, but just another sitcom. @Dilbatt: I agree. Watching the closing credits roll, you can’t help but be impressed by the many hats Lena Dunham wears. And speaking of the closing credits, do you know what the song is that plays over them on episode 4? The first few lines are
“I make the same mistakes,
feels like I’ll never learn,
always give way too much,
for little in return,
I haven’t changed a bit,
I’m still not over it,
I make the same mistakes,
I make the same mistakes.”
General Stuck
I can’t speak for others, but I get my own women’s douchebag days from Women’s Flat Track Roller DerbY. The Bolshoi Ballet it ain’t, but the douchebag factor is quite high.
Joseph Nobles
@kindness: Hell, yes, and looked around for Allen Funt the rest of the scene. I was dying.
Brachiator
@nastybrutishntall:
But here I can read your entire pithy post and easily see that it doesn’t make a fucking bit of sense.
Well,no. The plain hard fact is that Hollywood, yes even liberal Hollywood, operates on stupid assumptions. One of them is that once you have a critical mass of black people in a show, white people will stay away. Another is that romantic comedies should be all white (unless you have a hot Asian or Latina chick), because otherwise white people might get queasy and lose their shit.
This is the business part of show business. It’s stupid and often just plain wrong, but few executives risk anything if they go along with the conventional wisdom.
But there is nothing particularly racist in talking about this. Here you are just making shit up.
But when people say, I live in a mainly white world, so I just want to see white people on tv, yeah that’s racist.
Mnemosyne
@ruemara:
Being a frequently clueless white person, I will freely admit that I don’t particularly notice an absence of POC on a TV show until I see another, similar show do it differently. I didn’t really notice it on “Friends” until I started watching “Seinfeld” and realized that the two shows had a very different view (literally) of New York. I used to excuse the reboot of “Battlestar Galactica” for being so white because they film it in Canada, but then I watched a few episodes of “Warehouse 13,” which is also shot in Canada, and they had a much more inclusive cast of extras and guest roles, so I guess I can’t really blame Canada for that.
It’s usually the job of the casting director to hire those small roles, and I think most of them don’t even think about being inclusive unless they receive a specific directive from the executive producer. Hopefully Dunham will take the criticism the right way and instruct the casting director about how s/he should hire the small roles rather than going the “Friends” direction and hiring one (1) high-profile POC while the rest of the background stays white.
Merp
@Marc:
Truer words, etc. I came from a similar place, which had a fair amount of diversity but which forced you to work to get it, and transitioning to New York everything being out in the open and smashed together was one of the biggest and most obvious and enjoyable differences.
@BobS:
I ain’t saying Veep is like Louie, or something, which is re-defining TV or creating a new genre or whatever and offers almost awe-inspiring social observations.
Veep is just a sitcom. But I’m finding myself bowled over at just the craft of it. We’re thrown into a fairly complex social and institutional setting with the barest minimum of backstory, and not only is that setting being lucidly explained with no exposition with the steady accumulation of small details, it’s populated by an ensemble of main characters who are all being given distinct personalities and a wider set of characters who make the environment seem like it exists when the cameras turn off. Plus the plots of individual episodes are character driven, a good part of the humor is character driven, there are a dozen running jokes already, and there is just the barest hint of pathos. And it’s only been three episodes. And it’s funny!
I mean is there a recent sitcom that manages to do half of that in a twenty episode season, let alone its first one, let alone the first half of its first one? In an earlier thread I started hoping that this could someday become Fawlty Towers good. That’s the kind of excellence I think Veep can aspire to and attain, hopefully; FT didn’t offer any big conclusions about life or anything, it was just an exquisitely crafted sitcom that featured finely-drawn characters played by excellent actors with great dialogue and plot construction. And was fucking hilarious.
(The other obvious parallel is The Thick of It, for the same reasons, but Fawlty Towers is more well-known, I think, so hopefully more people will get what I’m trying to say.) (Arrested Development kind of works as an example of what Veep could be, too, but is so unique and relies on such a different sense of humor and aesthetic that I don’t think we’ll ever see its like again. FT and TToI weren’t a lot like AD, either.)
Of course there are institutional reasons that are at play here; being on HBO means it can be worked on for longer periods of time, that it doesn’t have to have the rising action climax commercial rising action climax commercial big climax denouement that most other sitcoms tend to be forced to have, that it doesn’t have to worry about episode to episode ratings as much.
Still, gotdamn. It is the first three episodes of a sitcom with just fantastic construction and execution. With dick jokes!
Mnemosyne
@Marcellus Shale, Public Dick:
Yeah, you kind of missed the context of that: she set up dinner with him so she could tell him that she thought she got HPV (aka genital warts) from him since he was the only other guy she’d ever had sex with, and he announced that he was now gay and living with a man, which was a bit of a shock to her since the two of them had dated for two years while they were in college.
So, no, she wasn’t accusing him of putting on gay affectations — they were arguing over the way he came out as gay to her, his ex-girlfriend.
Brachiator
@Liz:
Yep, Irene Adler was smarter than everyone else in the episode except Holmes, so Moffatt is a horrible sexist. He even has Holmes and Adler solve an unrelated case together (which is not even hinted at in the original short story), but that doesn’t matter. Adler must be seen as satisfying the cliches of being strong, smart, powerful, the absolute equal of Sherlock, and completely autonomous, or she doesn’t count as a character. I dunno. Seems kind of limiting.
Adler is also just one of the characters that Moffatt uses in the story to show a more human, involved side of Holmes. But it is clear that a number of viewers think that he made a big mistake in making Adler appear less heroic in their eyes in pursuing this, even though Moffat and the other people behind the show have significantly altered other characters in order to fit Holmes into the modern world.
Mnemosyne
@Merp:
Wait, seriously? I’m pretty sure that the show itself is condemning those characters for pretty much every word that comes out of their mouths and every action they take. I don’t think we’re supposed to think that Hannah is cute and funny and adorable. I think we’re supposed to think that she’s sad and deluded and laugh at her, not with her. Jessa isn’t supposed to be cool and hip and worldly, she’s stupid and dull and can’t even be bothered to take a pregnancy test before announcing to the world that she’s pregnant.
Since we’re only three episodes in (and I’ve only seen the first two), I think the show is still figuring out what it is, but I really don’t think that the four central figures are supposed to be protagonists in the traditional sense of the word. They really are supposed to be “Seinfeld”/”Curb Your Enthusiasm” figures whose adventures show what not to do.
asiangrrlMN
Frankly, I don’t give a shit in part because I don’t watch TV at all. Except Awake, which will be cancelled soon, anyway.
But, I never liked Seinfeld, and I thought Friends pretentious, and I have no use for this show, though, full warning, I haven’t seen it, in part because none of these shows have anything to do with me at all.
Full disclosure: I am a freak in many ways. I accept this. Therefore, there won’t be many shows/movies that speak to me. No people of color? I’m not watching it. Poorly-written female characters? Not watching it. That right there cuts out most of the shit available.
The fact that this show is whatever it is? Don’t give a fuck. But, yes, the lack of diversity would be the first reason I don’t watch it. In 2012, there is no reason not to have POC on your show. None. Is that tokenism? Hell, yeah, but it’s the base level for any show/movie I watch. Am I missing out on good shit? Undoubtedly. Do I care? Not in the least.
I will say TNC said it best in that we have our own stories – they’re just not being made.
James Gary
@Mnemosyne:
I’m pretty sure that the show itself is condemning those characters for pretty much every word that comes out of their mouths and every action they take.
The show doesn’t condemn them– in fact, they get away with it. To cite one example: Lena’s character loses her internship and alienates her parents, and she’s not living on the street on the next episode–in fact, her inability to pay her rent isn’t even mentioned as far as I remember. In the context of “Girls,” a real-world catastrophe like losing one’s entire income is just a bit of funny business, and that’s what I find incredibly annoying about the show. Now, I *do* have a sense of humor and I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically invalid about a TV sitcom that operates that way–but as I said above, it’s profoundly irritating to me that for some reason critics are praising the show as “realistic” and “insightful.”
(Disclaimer: I’ve only seen the first two episodes.)
Mnemosyne
@James Gary:
Why would she automatically be living on the street in the next episode? She didn’t live with her parents — they came in from out of town to visit and cut her off in person (that’s why they were staying in a hotel). Her roommate is her best friend from college, so it’s unlikely that she’s going to be evicted for at least a few months.
@asiangrrlMN:
This is a show where one of the main characters fails to show up for her own abortion because she’s busy fucking a cute guy she meets at a bar at two o’clock in the afternoon. I’m not sure that having a POC in that role would automatically be seen as a good thing.
I’m enjoying the show because it’s novel for me to get to see upper-class white women behaving like assholes and being slapped around by karma because of it, but it’s certainly not everyone’s cup of tea. I only get annoyed with the people who thought male-centered shows about similar characters like “Entourage” were, like, awesome, but somehow “Girls” is offensive to their delicate sensibilities.
I think ruemara’s point about the background and minor characters is a good one, though — it’s plausible to have a bubble in New York where the main characters are white and upper-class and mostly work and sleep with other people in their class, but it makes no sense that you barely even see POC walking down the street in the background in NYC. IMO, that’s more of a problem for the show than the lack of a POC main character who would be just as stupid, venal and ignorant as the white characters.
Merp
James Gary said it better than I would have. I’ll just add that when the show’s main character/creator/writer/director/caterer/insurer/publicist puts the words “I think I am a voice for a generation” into her character’s mouth, she doesn’t mean “Every aspect of this show is serving as a warning for my generation as to how now to behave.”
Plus (can’t help myself): that way of viewing the show simply doesn’t work. When they start riffing on white dudes chasing asian girls, it’s not funny like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is funny when its characters are saying stupid things; it’s not interesting in a dramatic sense, like when the Gossip Girl girls are doing their amoral machinations. The only way the scene works is straightforward acceptance that what they’re saying is funny.
When Lena starts dancing around the room after writing her “All adventurous girls do” tweet (can’t remember which episode), we’re not meant to find it pitiable or excessive or disgusting or funny in an IASIP sense. We’re meant to take delight in that character’s delight, to bask in her radiated energy, to have our frustration release with her frustration, to feel with her the tenuous but intense thrill that comes with accomplishing a small but tangible thing that hints at the possibility of success at the life we want to lead. That is not something a show who’s interpretative frame is condemning its characters for pretty much every word that comes out of their mouths and every action they take would even think about doing, because it so completely goes against that interpretive frame.
Finally, let’s say that that frame is, in fact, the one that Girls wants us to use in watching the show. It still has a racial problem, because it’s racial problems aren’t exclusively about the rich white girls interaction with minority characters. They’re about the depiction of those minority characters. Minority nannies who marvel at the beauty of one of the rich white girls and whose sole function is to assist that rich white girl in becoming a better person are a problem whether or not that rich white girl is a stupid, dull, entitled, unimaginative shitstain. Minority coworkers whose characterization and dialogue portray them as tacky and backward are a problem whether or not Hannah is sad and deluded and meant to be a beacon of warning to not act as she does.
Ugh everyone should just watch the first ten seasons of the Simpsons over and over forever and forever. Everything’s in there and it gets everything right. And it’s funny as hell.
Merp
(whoops, in that second sentence should be how *not* to behave)
Mnemosyne
@Merp:
Really? Because, again, I interpreted that as yet another instance of Hannah thinking she has something brilliant and/or insightful to offer the world when, really, she only has banal nothingness. And to celebrate, she reverts back to being a college freshman dancing in her dorm room with her roommate.
I think you’re overinterpreting the character’s feelings and projecting them onto the writer/director — you did notice that you used the writer/director’s name when you talked about the character’s actions, not the character’s name, right?
Merp
Do really find it backwards and pitiable for a 24 year old to express elation / get out frustration / have a good time by dancing around her apartment with her best friend? Srsly, as the kids say? Do you think grad students don’t do a little boogying when they finish writing a chapter / have a good day at the lab?
Plus the tv critics’ appraisal of that scene couldn’t be more opposed to yours. (Normally I don’t invoke them for much because for the most part they’re dumb, but when we’re talking about how a scene is generally interpreted, looking to the general interpretation by tv critics of a scene has some value).
Plus, even if the tweet is utterly banal and insipid and that character believes that it’s not, that doesn’t mean that her surprise/relief/joy that she’s able to write something she feels is worthwhile which indicates She Just Might Have A Future In Her Desired Career Which She’s Been Struggling With isn’t meant to be taken by the viewer as genuine and worth celebrating and maybe cathartic and maybe reminiscent/evocative of stupid stuff they did in their early twenties that they nevertheless felt at the time was important and worthwhile and gave encouragement to future goals.
All this is fairly straightforward and standard dramedy stuff. “Flawed characters who do stupid things but nevertheless have experiences and emotions that the viewer is meant to sympathize with / find evocative of their own experiences and emotions / resonate with on a personal level.” To say that’s not what Girls is doing is to say that Girls is forging a completely new style of show that has never been done before – a comedy whose characters’ repellant jokes are not funny, a drama whose characters cannot be engaged with because they are complete shits who are doing uninteresting things – and trying to do it while using bog-standard dramedy tropes.
The more likely and I would say accurate way that Girls wants to be interpreted is as “upper middle class twentysomething women who don’t know the rules for navigating any portion of their lives, and so fuck up without knowing it, face sometimes painful consequences for those fuckups, but are still trying to find joy, pursue goals and have worthwhile lives, and whose pursuit of those things while fucking up in a system whose rules they don’t know are meant to be relate-able and indicative of the way a certain class of people find themselves living.” Lena has said as much in interviews, it’s the critical consensus of the show, it fits literally every aspect of the show so far.
Abandoning that for “the characters all suck as people and we’re meant to be judgmental about everything they do” seems unreasonable and without much rationale behind it.
As far as overidentifying Hannah the character with Lena the person, I don’t see how there’s any evidence of that in my analysis besides writing Lena instead of Hannah once. Hannah obviously does stuff that Lena thinks is stupid (“Maybe this picture of my boyfriend’s penis wrapped in fur was sent to another guy! Yeah, that’s what happened!”). The question is whether Hannah only does stuff that Lena thinks is stupid and worthy of condemnation instead of empathy, identification, etc. The answer I think is pretty clearly no.
Plus (final plus, promise): let’s not get away from the most substantive critique here, which is the show’s racial problem, which is just as strong even if everything about your interpretation of the show is absolutely correct.
Another Halocene Human
I resent the notion that a mediocre talent gets hurtled to the top just because she has 1%er parents and is so clueless she has mentally rewritten the POC in her world as white just like her, which again comes back to her middling talent. It’s barely good and certainly not great and an embarrassment for HBO.
Also, too, Sex and the City had its issues (for example, essentially using women as standins for gay men, although that aspect may also be somewhat overstated), but it also broke ground in television. Girls, as noted all over this thread, has many (and drearyful) antecedents. Most of which are actually more entertaining (not to mention polished, ie produced by professionals with experience… but who needs that when there are bright young darlings around? this is the world of the GINI coefficient on steroids… this is the world of the 1% of the 1%, lottery capitalism, the precious few making all the decisions, leading to average degradation in decision-making)
the fugitive uterus
cannot believe there were 169 commnts to this post. it almost makes me want to watch the show.
almost.