“Girls! Girls! Girls!” New Sitcom Is a Fresh Change

There are a few perks about attending a women’s college: warmly-welcomed hairy legs, communal singings of “Kumbaya” in the Quad and excruciatingly long sessions of watching and re-watching the most accurate portrayal of women and their inner “struggles”: the one, the only Sex and the City.

This is why we eagerly await the season premiere of Girls, Lena Dunham’s new HBO show about the vicissitudes of being young, white, thin, conventionally attractive and heterosexual.

You know, that underrepresented point of view.

The point of view we’re referring to is one of the young women who live off their parents’ dime, refer to themselves as ladies and tweet about being the “voice of a generation.” Perhaps we can take a page from the Cornelia phrasebook and beg our friends to lobotomize us if we, too, are ever living in New York, listing “blogger” as an occupation.

Despite the tacky premise, we are ready to see this show. Thought Catalog and other sites exist to capture our underemployed, overeducated cadre of young, tenuously middle-classed people who can’t get the guys sleeping with them to call themselves boyfriends. Finally, the zeitgeist is archived in HBO’s immortality. After all, the Mafia, polygamists and undertakers didn’t exist in our collective unconsciousness until they came to our home box office.

The march toward representations of actual American women onscreen is ongoing, but this Apatow-produced project is perhaps the first of the “post-Bridesmaids era” – you may know Bridesmaids as the magical movie that made us all laugh but somehow made it culturally OK for women to get sick onscreen.

Dunham, the native New Yorker and Oberlin graduate who is barely shy of her 25th year, writes, directs and stars in her much-awaited HBO show, which, if we’re lucky, will merely bear skeletal remnants of that whole “four women lonely in New York trying to find out who they are and meeting a lot of royal tools in the process” premise.

While we were watching the various trailers and episode clips of the zesty, upcoming show, we noted some of the eye-catching details that separated Girls from the rest of the millennium-made HBO series where the main protagonists are women and the main focus of the series is, well, men.

First off, we noted that Hannah (Lena Dunham), a 24-year-old native Midwesterner who’s still living off her parents, does not happen to have the perfect, socially constructed, male-idolized type of body norm that most female television protoganists have and excitedly flaunt on every single episode. She is plucky and supple and appears to obtain the body weight of an actual woman.

Hannah is bright and funny –spewing lines that are witty and undeniably honest. At one point, when Hannah’s sad excuse for a boyfriend casually breaks up with her she replies, unfazed, “Will you still have sex with me?” To which he replies, with an unmistakable air of douchebag intent, “When it’s convenient.”

The writing is solid and the character development – though unsurprisingly stereotypical – is enticing. Despite witnessing past botches with TV series conveying women and their struggles with finding a husband and navigating their way through New York, we think it’s safe to say that we’re going to give Girls a fair chance.