GIRLS talk (the Lena Dunham thread)

give me bitchy old broads zinging each other with fake sets and a laugh track over self-conscious single cam ironic meta whatever

― jesus christ (strongo hulkington's ghost dad), Thursday, April 19, 2012 10:42 PM (5 seconds ago) Bookmark

^^

i guess this show should be called Non-Precious-Metal Girls

Aluminum Girls

ok fuck it, i'm gonna guy buy some night court dvds, you guys bring the snacks and we'll have a marathon

I am watching this right now. It's OK so far, I guess. I really really dislike the girl in the pink juicy jumpsuit though. I realize she's supposed to be annoying but MY GOD.

watch golden girls instead

Pink jumpsuit girl felt like a stock Apatow character dropped into Dunham's world

agreed but it was a bit of badly needed humor

i loved mamet's scene. not bc she was anything more than a caricature but bc at least her awkward attempt to use mediocre pop culture as a prism to understand her life was recognizable + sympathetic to me. satc is such a terrible show but i have seen at least 70% of the episodes and i knew exactly what she meant when she said she tried to put her miranda hat on for work. i mean, totally asinine and ridiculous, but relatable.

satc is a pretty great show actually, or at least could be.

I would be very surprised if GIRLS ever equalled it

Many other industry voices say Dunham is under no obligation to incorporate different minority groups.

“Most wealthy white girls in America are surrounded by other wealthy white girls, so that’s who they choose to be friends with. So what? Are we so immature that we need to throw in a token African-American or Asian to make us better about the fact that some white people have zero exposure to diversity? That doesn’t help bring races together or heal inequality,” pop culture writer Jenn Hoffman told FOX411’s Pop Tarts column. “That’s an idealistic liberal media driven band-aid at best or completely unrealistic PC garbage at worst.”
Dan Gainor, Vice President of Business & Culture for the Media Research Center concurred that the racial condemnation was “over-hyped.”

“Not every TV show needs to find its PC racial balance so lefties can celebrate and network execs can market to every single minority in America," he said. "That might surprise some, but there are groups of friends that might be racially homogenous. It’s not a crisis."

satc's first few seasons were pretty good with some sharp writing. it turned into a horrible cartoon after a while though

pop culture writer Jenn Hoffman told FOX411’s Pop Tarts column

http://www.jennhoffman.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/blogtop3.jpg

SATC's first season was great. The was horrible. I've seen <10 eps after season 1, if that. x-posts

err should have been the "rest" was horrible

ex-The Apprentice contestant Jenn Hoffman told FOX411’s Pop Tarts column

This was mostly boring for me. Dunham was the best part and I'm sure I'll watch it again but it wasn't fantastic or anything. Pretty excited to see Peter Scolari though.

haha i wasnt going to but this:

i think some of the ways she's shot eating food (the spaghetti with her parents + the cupcake in the bathtub immediately come to mind) and the sex scene were particularly degrading

was a... strange reaction to have, i think. like 'degrading' is not how i read this at all, i identified w/her quite a bit here, thought it was really funny and true, helped me 'get' the character and sympathize with her.

― Masonic Butt (Lamp), Tuesday, April 17, 2012 11:16 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Lamp otm. I thought the sex scene was pretty great and maybe the one of the most realistic I've ever seen.

I’ve found that men — just in the little bit of research I’ve done — find the sexual thing in the show more sobering than women do. And this is kind of a leap, but I think it’s because guys are like, “Have I ever made a girl feel that way? And is it rape?” Literally, I think that is what comes into their brains. I know that sounds like a dramatization, but don’t you kind of think guys think, “That’s not the sex I had, girls I had sex with were happy as fuck.” It was interesting reading about him sort of worrying that girls in general were allowing themselves to be taken advantage of. I will tell you, I’ve had loving sexual experiences, and anxiety-producing ones, probably slightly more anxiety-producing ones at this point. But none of them have ever made me feel like I was being forced into situations outside of my field of choice. If you notice my mincey language, it’s just that I’m still shedding the fact that I went to Oberlin College and if you slightly mangled your women’s/gender studies pronouns, you’d be sent to some Guantanamo for liberal arts students. So I still have this fear of my professor like jumping out of the walls and beating me with a giant Gayatri Chakravorty book or something.

from Salon interview

Huh, wow. I didn't say anything yesterday because I hadn't watched it yet but you mentioned something about that scene and finding it particularly dark and just from the whatever description I'd read at that pooint I was thinking that it sounded dark but pretty otm and that more than anything else I read is what made me want to watch it. That scene was definitely the most interesting in the whole ep.

Is the guy that made the tea someone? He looked/sounded really familiar but I couldn't place him.

Hm. satc was like eating chips, delicious and filling and addictive but then you feel kind of gross afterward. I watched every single episode within a few weeks several years ago and was kind of glad i did even tho it made me feel weird. i haven't seen it since.

Friends was more like eating cheap ice cream. Good but I hadn't quite learned enough life lessons about quality vs quantity. I got tired of it.

I don't know what junk food Girls is yet. maybe it's like eating cupcakes.

In a tub.

I sort of did what you did with SATC with Friends. I didn't watch it when it was out but when it was in it's penultimate season I watched it from beginning to end and wound up liking it a lot more than I thought I would.

Oh man, the typos. I obv need sleep

It makes me very sad that in my current shower it is impractical to bring drinks with me.

That is said. I have coffee in the shower every morning.

sad! ugh, see?! bed.

It's all a bit more complex than necessary. Like cupcakes - just make a cake! I was trying to describe this show to a friend tonight and was making all these circular motions with my arms in trying to talk about the show's self-consciousness and the characters' self-consciousness and the living as image of self, plus the being on tv-ness of it all. It made me tired.
xp

if you're really industrious you can figure out a way to drink beer in any shower

Then again, a lot of being in your 20s involves pretty simple things being more complex than necessary. Learning.
xp

http://www.xojane.com/it-happened-me/lena-dunham-girls

I can do it, Jess, it would just mean a lot of water on the floor from all the times I reached out. I'm sure it'll happen this summer at some point.

wow that's really something E

lol are you being sarcastic? I can't tell. I just saw it earlier and thought is was sort of interesting as another opinion on LD which everyone seems to have today.

I think he means the drinking coffee in the shower.

lol oh

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/04/girls-through-the-veil/256154/

yeah i remember coates taking that line before when something like this came up. it's certainly a good point that given this alfin woman is on the writing staff, characterization of nonwhite characters would maybe not be a strong suit on this show.

it's great that he takes that line, because it's encouraging rather than bleak. but i think i'm just a little too negative to feel totally comfortable with it.

obviously he's otm about power brokers in the various culture industries recognizing other voices.

naw, i meant the intensity of self in that article you posted, "why aren't _I_ the megastar"

Then again, a lot of being in your 20s involves pretty simple things being more complex than necessary.

mmmm yes

I feel somewhat like a jerk due to the fact there was obviously a lot of show set-up time since it's a first episode, but was there really a throwaway line about the English-accented girl being pregnant? I realize this is no-relationship, drama-tired me but I was like... really, they're using that issue in a show about a group of women? I mean, I guess it'd happen plot-wise eventually and they're probably being tricky by throwing it out right at the beginning of a show, but it still rubbed me the wrong way.

if nothing else, i'm glad this show has provided a chance to talk about race/privilege and i hope the creators have learned something from it... i mean aside from lesley arfin who just seems like a human troll. the cynical side of me imagines them all sitting around rolling their eyes at this criticism though :(

is being pregnant really just an 'issue' if you're doing a show about women's lives?

yeah, mh, i don't understand your criticism really

There is certainly an argument that EG "rich black girls are like *this*" is a less bad than "rich black girls ... aren't"

idk, on one level it's a very real thing that makes sense in the flow of the lives of these characters

on the other hand, it's also a plot device that nearly every long-running tv show uses

like what if there was a tv show about a group of women who were better than average at contraception and there was never a "someone may be pregnant" plot

this is me throwing male privilege all over the place and I'm going to stfu now