PRETTY, PRETTY GOOD.

it’s not an emergency

But Frasier season 8 isn’t as great.

GIRLS

tvhangover:

So, I was pretty excited for Girls. I saw Tiny Furniture. I got Tiny Furniture or whatever. I was sure that I would also get Girls, too. I don’t exactly know what we were all expecting with Girls. The New Girl with more nudity and less bangs? Or a Sex and the City that we weren’t too young to relate to and where everyone was poor? But it wasn’t really any of those things.

That opening sequence was one of the worst beginnings to anything I have ever seen. Ever. (And, truthfully, this is speaking as a former 24-year-old who had to take money from her parents because she was unemployed or under employed and unmotivated by despair, but this is also speaking as a person who was 24 years old and taking money from her parents and feeling BAD about it). Every single one of these characters is unlikeable. Hanna is a whiny loser with an apparent self esteem problem. Marnie is quiet honestly a cold ass bitch who wants to break up with her boyfriend because he is too nice to her (sure you can want to break up with your boyfriend, you can feel less for him that he does for you, you can think your boyfriend is boring or smothering you, but you don’t have to be such a bitch about it!), and Jessa is that friend that you have who is cool, like really cool, like way too cool for you, but who you also feel has to feel like she is way to cool for you, and you doubt the truth of half of the things she says. And don’t even get me started on that weird actor sex friend guy. He is so a REAL person who I have actually met and so terrible I don’t even want to talk about it.

But, the saving grace of all of these awful people is that they are unabashedly awful without that air of cool (except we can all agree that that apartment is way too nice for them. Don’t act like I don’t know what Park Slope and the nice part of Fort Greene look like!) that so many other awful characters have to make you like them, and they don’t get rewarded for their terribleness. Hanna talks her way out of her job (she does not get fired like she says she does. That is all your doing, girl), Jessa is pregnant (sure you are), and Marnie doesn’t actually have the guts to break up with that boyfriend that she doesn’t like anymore.

They are all deeply flawed, which is what makes characters interesting and endearing and complicated and interesting to watch.  Also this is just the pilot so everyone will stop sucking pretty soon. Right?

Amongst this and this and a million other things on the internet, Girls has definitely gotten a lot of disappointed fans. I’m hopeful, but was fairly underwhelmed by the pilot.

Here’s what I gathered from the first episode:

The characters keep with the “awkward is in” trend that’s going around, which isn’t inherently bad, as long as it’s played honestly. The honest moments in Girls tend to be tiny, but still help add realism to the world: when Hanna almost talks over Marnie in the bathtub, when someone says “thank you,” when Marnie’s boyfriend’s awkwardly smiles as the “too cool” Jessa enters and he’s doing his best to not look like he doesn’t know what Jessa’s talking about - simple things that happen all the time in real life that somehow get streamlined out of most televised representations of real life. I appreciated those snippets, not just because they’re often forgotten, but because they’re just true.

But those few moments of realism didn’t seem to be enough.

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