thoughts on Girls, Season One (spoilers)

So.  I rented Season One of Girls from the public library on Thursday and finished it in three days.  The episodes are short (about thirty minutes each), and the whole season was only ten episodes long, so it went fast.  Some thoughts:

Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham) is an interesting character.  A couple of things she goes through in the first season are so similar to things that I've gone through that at one point I said out loud, "Wow.  None of my life experiences are original," and at another point, I shut an episode off halfway through and went back to it the next day because I just really couldn't even deal.  There are other aspects that I can't relate to at all.  The whole action of the series is set in motion because her parents tell her that they're not going to support her anymore, given that she's twenty-four and has been out of college for two years now.  What? People's parents do that?  And there are yet other aspects that make me sometimes say out loud, "You're a ridiculous person," or cover my face with my hands because it's so uncomfortable to watch.  She makes a rape joke on a job interview, for example.  At another point, she has a boss who is a little handsy, and rather than asking him to stop, quitting the job, just putting up with it like her co-workers do, or taking any number of courses of action that you might imagine a human being taking in this scenario, she offers to have sex with him in the most awkward and uncomfortable way possible.  Her goal is to be a writer, but she goes through long periods of unemployment where it doesn't seem like she's even really actively looking for a job, which is a little frustrating to watch because Marnie (Allison Williams), her best friend and roommate for most of the first season (who actually has a consistent, real, paying job), winds up picking up the slack a lot, and Hannah seems to kind of take it for granted. 

This eventually becomes a problem, though I don't know that I totally got the argument at the end of the season that leads to Marnie moving out.  Marnie has been dating a guy named Charlie (Christopher Abbott) for four years.  She's pretty much done with the relationship from the very beginning of the series, but it doesn't actually end until Charlie's friend Ray (Alex Karpovsky) snoops around, finds Hannah's diary, and reads Hannah's thoughts on Charlie and Marnie's relationship.  This leads into a fairly horrifying (from the perspective of someone who keeps a diary, anyway) scene where Charlie and Ray play a song called "Hannah's Diary" in one of their shows that consists of Charlie reading aloud from Hannah's diary while he and Ray play accompanying music.  It's awful.  Charlie and Marnie have a long talk in which she eventually begs him to stay together, then decides (during sex) that she really does want to break up.  He starts dating someone else almost immediately, and she is miserable.  This all happens at around the same time that Hannah starts dating her hook-up, Adam (Adam Driver), for real, and Marnie and Hannah eventually have a huge argument that leads to each of them yelling about who's more selfish and who's the worse friend.  Marnie eventually says she wants to move out.  I don't totally get what leads to this, or what they're really arguing about.  I don't know if this is because the show didn't lead up to it well enough, or because the argument isn't really about anything in particular and just the culmination of issues that they've been dealing with for years.

Hannah and Marnie's group of friends is rounded out by Jessa (Jemima Kirke), who went to college with Hannah and Marnie, and Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet), Jessa's cousin.  Jessa is a nanny for most of the first season until the father of the kids she's watching becomes interested in her.  She surprises everyone by marrying someone she's known for only two weeks in the season finale.  Shoshanna lives in an incredibly pink and fluffy apartment (that she shares with Jessa and eventually Marnie); uses terms like "OMG," "obvi," and "totes adorbs" a lot; accidentally smokes crack at one point; is a virgin until the season finale; and is maybe my favorite character on the show, even though she has the least to do.  It's just always a good time when she shows up.  Ray watches her when she's high on crack and is eventually the guy she loses her virginity to, and he tells her she just "vibrates on a different frequency," which is as good of a way to describe her as any. 

Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, and Shoshanna are all so different that I don't fully understand how they're all friends.  I know that's a complaint that was made about Sex and the City, as well, and I guess I'll give it a pass since these girls are all just out of college (or in Shoshanna's case, still in college), and I feel like college friendships are often based more on randomness (who you're assigned to live with or near in the dorms, who you have a work study job with, for example) than common interests.  Still.  The thing about TV friendships is that they often withstand things that would tear real-life friendships apart, simply because everyone's still on the show and it usually doesn't work to have characters that don't really interact with each other.  If we all look back at Friends, for example, we will remember that Chandler basically stole Joey's girlfriend at one point, and that, brief periods of trying to avoid each other notwithstanding, Ross and Rachel stayed friends during the "off" parts of their on-again, off-again relationship.  Because it's less common for real friendships to survive under such circumstances, TV shows have to show either that these characters' lives are so intertwined that it's impossible for them to avoid each other, or that their friendships are so strong that they will fight to work out conflicts, withstand periods of awkwardness, and move past their own hurt feelings and pride in ways that real friends are, quite frankly, not always able or willing to do.  I don't get that from these four girls yet.  As I said, I will give it a pass because these are college friends and college wasn't that long ago, and also because we're only ten episodes in.  Also, I really like each of these girls separately, even if I don't totally get them together.  Also, also, I appreciate that it's fairly out in the open that Marnie and Jessa don't really like each other (at least for most of the season) and only hang out because they have friends in common.

The final important element of the show is Adam, who starts as Hannah's hook-up and eventually becomes her real boyfriend, though their status is unclear at the end of the first season.  In an early episode, Hannah complains that he's so great when they're together, but then she won't hear from him in two weeks and he won't return her texts and she'll feel like she's made him up.  Eventually, she shows up at his apartment to deliver the iconic speech that includes the sentence, "I just want someone who thinks I'm the best person in the world, and wants to hang out all the time, and wants to have sex with only me."  They supposedly aren't going to see each other anymore after that (and after he has sex with her one "last" time, because aughhhh), but within a couple of episodes he's yelling at her, "Do you want me to be your boyfriend?! Is that what you want?!," and then he is, and then things actually change for the better.  The season ends with him offering to move in after Marnie moves out, and her brushing him off and asking her gay ex-boyfriend Elijah (Andrew Rannells) to move in instead.  Adam is hurt, upset, and frustrated by this, and it's unclear where they stand at the end of the episode and season.

Also: Jessa and Thomas-John's (Chris O'Dowd's) wedding.  We don't even know that Jessa and Thomas-John, a character who we've been introduced to exactly once before, are dating at the time that Jessa invites all of the main characters to a "mystery party" that turns out to be their wedding.  They tell the story of how they met and fell in love.  Most wedding goers seem surprised, mystified, and a bit skeptical.  Shoshanna is visibly upset.  Adam cries a little; when Hannah asks him what's going on, he says something like, "I'm very moved.  People finding love, taking shelter...it's beautiful." And...I'm sorry, but it is pretty moving.  I know that it's silly to marry someone you've known that short of time.  I know, based on the number of episodes IMDB tells me that Thomas-John is in, that it probably doesn't last.  There is something moving about being willing to make that big of a commitment and take that big of a chance, though. 

So, despite some small issues, I enjoyed it a lot.  Looking forward to watching the next season.  It is going to be delivered to my public library from a different public library within a couple of days.  So that's exciting.