Girls

After an awful season 2, Lena Dunham's Brooklynocentric comedy celebrating coffee, ambition and sex is fixed. [20 Jan 2014, p.41]

There’s a gainful, functioning relationship among the four oft-miserable principals. And so far it’s still in place after the first three episodes.

Now, three seasons in, Dunham and her team are better at doing what they’ve been trying to do all along: create a string of lovely character vignettes, with a deliberate disinterest in plot and a fascination with a certain zeitgeist. This is specific enough that it has its disadvantages, but now that the characters have been around for two seasons, it’s become easier to understand their different versions of cluelessness.

The show is becoming more complex along with its characters, and as a result, the viewer feels a greater investment.

The Season 3 premiere of Girls is good. It isn’t brilliant and life-changing nor is it terrible trash. It’s not as profound as we force Girls to be, nor is it meaningless. It’s just good. Sometimes it’s very good. It’s certainly enjoyable. But it’s neither the best nor the worst thing ever.

Along with the story line insights, there is a feeling of control overarching the early episodes, a narrative fluidity replacing the spikier, and quickly tiresome, need to shock. Oh, Hannah's still naked and body fluids anchor several conversations, but Girls seems to be maturing as a creative enterprise just as its characters are maturing as people.

Girls is well aware of the conundrum Hannah and Adam and other characters are trapped in--we're all trapped in it, to some degree--and it has sense enough to let us figure this, and a lot of other things, out for ourselves.

These four women are amusing, at times poignant, but not easily likable. The show is caustic and hard to watch, but harder to turn off. In Season 3, their solipsism and callousness are even more pointed, all the more shocking, and still quite funny.

Girls and its girls are funnier and more cartoonishly sociopathic than ever. The show continues to engage with and undercut criticism about its characters’ myopia and flaws by owning it.

The early part of the third may not be as good as the first season or stretches of the second, but for a few million anxiously awaiting Sunday, it's still good enough.

A lighter season that engages the chief criticisms of Girls--Hannah and her maturity-challenged pals are self-absorbed; they're actually hideous friends to one another--if only to say: That's part of the point.

Girls remains just as disaffected and misanthropic as ever.

Eventually one starts to think about what one is doing with one’s life and how one actually wishes to spend it rather than tripping from one youthful, unconsidered mishap into another.... I can say that Dunham and her co-creators understand that progression.

This is still not conventional TV, but season three gets closer, and that’s not an entirely bad thing. The cringe ratio is down--slightly--and characters begin to emerge in unexpected ways.

It’s more fun hanging out with some of the other girls.... More of them please--and less of the Hannah and Adam show.

Good actors pop in and out of their lives (including Richard E. Grant as another rehab patient, and Bob Balaban as a shrink), but Dunham’s narrow field of vision doesn’t accommodate much beyond her core. That’s fine, in most respects, except that as played, it tends to sap the reality from situations.