Some shit is just too ridiculous to engage. Let’s use our energy wisely, 2014.
— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) January 17, 2014
As soon as Breaking Bad ended, I realized that my favorite TV show on the air right now is Girls. It’s hard to be a Girls fan and not continually want to do battle with the stuffy, self-important think-piece culture that’s blossomed around it on the internet. Part of the reason I don’t write about Girls is that I don’t want to add to that conversation. I don’t think it helps anything. I think the media comes across as stupid and diminishing when the best TV comedy writer in America has to keep answering inane questions about nudity and what an entire generation of young women wants.
Lena Dunham is a brilliant writer. She is also very, very funny. Dunham’s characters are some of the best on television right now. On first blush, they feel like caricatures, or fools. But in a matter of minutes, they assert their humanity in subtle, important ways. The actors on Girls are all excellent at what they do—there’s a reason why so many Girls actors were cast in the most recent Coen Brothers movie—but Dunham is deep in the DNA of every frame of the show. You couldn’t remove Dunham from Girls any more than you could remove Charlie Chaplin from Modern Times.
Dunham doesn’t need my defense, or any defense. She does just fine on her own. Her show has only gotten better as it’s progressed, and she’s only become more graceful in the public eye as her fame has grown. I just read about all the bullshit that she has to go through and I get so tired. I can’t imagine that any normal person gives a shit about any of it—the dickish questions, the shameful publicity stunts for the sake of clickbait—and I just imagine the same media people clicking the links on the same boring articles over and over again and it just makes me so sad and so tired. Dunham deserves better than this. Hell, we all deserve better than this. Let’s just move along and ignore the fucking idiots and devil’s advocates and shameless sleaze merchants until they go away, okay? It’s time for something better.
Shorter Paul Constant: “I LIKE A TV SHOW AND FUCK YOU”
The Strangercury sure seems to like throwing around the words “dick” and “dickish.”
The thing that kills me about Girls is that every girl on the show seems to end every single statement of fact as if it’s a question? Do you see what I mean? Is it more annoying than the sexy baby voice? Gah?
That show is drivel, period. But far be it from me to tell people what to do….if they enjoy train wrecks, great
I haven’t seen it yet, and I’ll take your word the show is great…. but if you are referring to a journalist asking about seemingly excessive nudity on the show, I don’t find the question offensive or out-of-bounds.
I’d bet the response, this feigned outrage, to the question would have been far different had a woman reporter been asking it.
Can Paul Constant please write about tv instead of national politics? It would be an improvement.
Never seen it or read much about it, but it all sounds very Sex and the City 2.0. Shrug.
For a show ostensibly about real modern women, it seems odd that a real modern woman writer would continually write scripts depicting modern women as insecure, men-requiring, bad-men-excusing, mainstream-culture-obeying shallow dolts. Yet somehow Girls is a flag in the ground for feminism, and the Newsroom is abhorrent on the same score.