My devotion to the ’90s cult that was Sex and the City
is such that the majority of discs in my DVD boxset now refuse to play, as if urging me to stop living vicariously through the characters’ (let’s face it) wholly unattainable world of Cosmos and Manolos, and get out into the considerably less ‘fabulous’ world I inhabit.
For many fans, 2008’s film revival was a welcome return to the ostentatious land of Manhattan’s elite – one where Vivienne Westwood just so happens to decide that a couture wedding gown “belongs to you”. And then, along came SATC 2…and well, the less said about that the better. Even the most diehard of fans “got to thinking”, Carrie style, that maybe Miss Bradshaw and co. belonged to another era.
And then, earlier this year, HBO started touting the arrival of a brand new show; one they presented as 2012’s answer to Sex and the City. Given its similar themes – the friendships and sex lives of a group of young female New Yorkers – as well as the phenomenal success of the SATC brand, those at HBO could be forgiven for milking these comparisons for all their worth. And yet, on closer inspection, the world Lena Dunham (the young, rising star who both writes and stars in the show) presents us with could not be more different.
The fact that Girls is the brainchild of Dunham alone makes its presence on our screens all the more noteworthy. Rather than a group of middle-aged American screenwriters gathered in a boardroom, the show presents us with the lives of a young female graduate and her friends through the frank and funny eyes of someone who knows the experience first hand, and just happens to have made her own TV show about it.
Yet since its release, Dunham could be said to be experiencing what can only be described as a ‘Marmite effect’. Criticism has tended to fall into two polarised camps, which is perhaps unsurprising given that the characters she presents us with are all considerably flawed, selfish and self-indulgent. Critics have bemoaned the girls’ status as privileged, middle class young women, and have described them variously as “smug, self-satisfied”, and – somewhat unforgivingly – as either “neurotic sex toys” or “psycho man eaters”, as well as citing a lack of diversity among the main characters.
But I am baffled by such a response. Certainly, Dunham’s exploration of the trials of girlhood is limited to a group of arts graduates living in New York, but, as Dunham herself attests, a show “that so perfectly represented every culture, race and religion it would seem so forced [and] deliberate that it would take away from any good intention it was going for.” Some of the most popular shows of recent times- Friends, How I Met Your Mother, The OC et al, are not exactly ground-breaking in their approach to diversity, yet they seem to have escaped the critics’ wrath.
Admittedly, Dunham’s character, Hannah, might be experiencing an identity crisis funded by her parents as she takes on an unpaid internship, but I fail to see why Dunham should be criticised for exploring a new breed of young person. The experience of a post-adolescent, struggling to find a direction and clinging on to a less frankly terrifying stage of life will strike a chord with many of the show’s young viewers.
While Sex and the City was aspirational in terms of its portrayal of friendship, wealth, and cocktails, Girls, set in Brooklyn – a far more recession era appropriate location – is far more gritty and considerably less fabulous in its approach to all of these things. And this leaves its HBO predecessor looking distinctly out of touch.
Added to this, the women of Sex and the City may have dared to bare on screen, but in what is typical of the age of body obsession we now live in, Dunham’s body has faced unprecedented scrutiny for a female protagonist. It was never the actual presentation of sex in SATC that shocked critics, but rather the characters’ attitudes towards it.Yet with Dunham, who does not possess the same gym-honed physique, her nudity has rung alarm bells. Its inclusion in the show has been described as “shocking” and “brave”, not for the refreshing, if sightly uncomfortable, presentation of young female sexuality, but because she does not have a flat stomach and skinny thighs.
It would seem therefore we have now come full circle: while Sex and the City was applauded for its frank display of casual sex and the idea that women could “have sex like men”, critics are now shocked that a young woman now has the audacity to complain about anything – what have you got to moan about?! They seem to suggest – you can have sex, independence and as many shoes as you want, and these days no one’s going to tell you that you can’t.
As the show finally makes its way across the Atlantic this Autumn, if you find yourself believing the show to be “unstoppably irritating” as one critic supposedly did, ask yourself: Could this be because Girls hits a little too close to home?