‘Girls’: Final-Season Fun and Fury
If, in the years since Lena Dunham ascended to pop-culture prominence with the debut of HBO’s Girls in 2012, you have felt some irritation with her for the apparent self-absorption, even self-obsession, she projects in essays and in squibs on social-media platforms, let me say: My friend, I feel ya. There have been times when, if Dunham was a book, I’d have tossed it, mid-chapter, across the room while yelling, “Oh, come off it!”
But it took the sixth-season episode of Girls that premieres Sunday night to remind me how extravagantly gifted Dunham is at dramatizing (and comic-izing) the self-consciousness not only of her fictional alter ego — the perennially struggling writer Hannah Horvath — but also of the other “girls” who co-star with her. This is also true of what is now an array of men who’ve been treated to what we might call The Hannah Horvath Experience.
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The new season starts with Hannah having an essay published — in the New York Times’s “Modern Love” column — that grew out of last season’s triumphant monologue and was delivered at the storytelling showcase Moth (Dunham always gets the little Manhattan striver details right). And then we’re off racing through new observations (Hannah: “I definitely feel I’m more of a dumpling than a woman”), new assignments (Hannah is sent to write about a “female surf camp”), and new wrinkles in the relationships between Hannah’s pals (fresh developments, for example, in the impending divorce of Allison Williams’s Marnie and Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s delightfully icky Desi).
The Night Of’s Riz Ahmed and The Americans’ Matthew Rhys make guest appearances in the three episodes sent out to critics for review, and I guarantee you many Internet explosions will occur after the airing of the third and remarkable half-hour, in which Rhys plays a successful novelist confronted by Hannah about his sexual history with women. Written by Dunham, it’s a striking piece of work that allows Rhys’s middle-aged satyr to give as much of a justification for his behavior as it does Hannah a chance to react to it.
Some of the show’s fun and games have begun to feel strained. I’m thinking particularly of the never-ending obtuseness of Zosia Mamet’s Shoshanna, which has come to seem cutesy and unconvincing over so long a period. And these opening episodes don’t do Andrew Rannells’s Elijah any favors, merely trading on his well-established bitchiness rather than evolving Elijah to any extent. But most of the time, Girls remains impressive, and as the series moves toward its conclusion, it looks more and more like the kind of TV cultural marker that will stand as a reference point for its period in history — all that, plus some good OxyContin jokes and a fine use of Joni Mitchell’s “Free Man in Paris.”
Girls airs Sunday nights at 10 p.m. on HBO.
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