Girls

Sunday night’s premiere featured some of the best writing the show has produced. More and more, Hannah Horvath is resembling a character we no longer identify with, but so clearly recognize. She’s annoying and hard to tolerate, but grounded enough to be endearing.

Hannah and most of her friends share a quick-witted, sardonic millennial sense of humor, but their banter is at its funniest and most revealing when the characters are oblivious to the effect of their words.

Like life, it unfolds in quirky ways. Knowing Dunham, its ending will leave questions: Will we get to see what great work comes from her character's experiences? Easily, this could be the "Go Set a Watchman" for something more.

In its final stretch of episodes, Girls still contains all the perfect details that have defined its world in the past--Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) expounding on the limitations of Paul Krugman, Ray reading Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. But its ambitions, like Hannah’s, seem to have benefited from realizing that the best stories have a deeper purpose than simple entertainment.

Most of the time, Girls remains impressive.

Through three episodes Girls is back on solid and often increasingly inventive footing.

At this point, if you’re in on Girls, you’re going to watch through the end, and I expect plenty of weirdness, awkwardness, and sadness before we get to the conclusion. It’s definitely time for this story to end, but there can be some interesting tales before we get there.

Based on the first three episodes, Dunham is ready to end her story with satirical precision and self-aware compassion.

The new season is shiny and sharp, a neon-colored candy with a puckish and puckering quality.

After watching her stumble with a stubbornness approaching active determination for so long, seeing Hannah take new steps toward self-improvement--small and stuttering though they are--comes as a relief.

The first three episodes of season six, all written by Dunham, suggest that Girls will go out as it came in: lancing its characters’ pretensions and delusions while demanding that we care about them as people, and working in a storytelling mode that’s lightly serialized with stand-alone plotlines and structural stunts mixed in.

Expect drama. Expect painful revelations. Expect uncomfortable moments. Expect life lessons learned begrudgingly. All these contemplations are already found throughout these first three episodes, and they’ll surely be seen in these final seven episodes.

Girls is essentially a hipster soap opera--occasionally clever or smart--but not as revealing as it led you to believe. This year it might take the step that has been promised since its first season, but maybe not.