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Everything You Never Wanted To Know About The Return Of <em>Girls</em>
By
Jen Carlson
Published Jan 11, 2013
Modified Jan 14, 2013
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By
Jen Carlson
Published Jan 11, 2013
Modified Jan 14, 2013
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In the second episode of Girls' season two, there's one scene in which it seems clear that Lena Dunham, speaking through her character Hannah Horvath, is having a conversation with her critics. "I don't live in a world with [racial] divisions like that," she declares, in a not-so-subtle reference to the backlash against the show's first season. Some viewers criticized Dunham for excluding minorities from her twenty-something version of New York City, and in season two—which starts this Sunday—she finally gets to respond on screen, almost immediately. Not even three minutes into the season two opener, Dunham's character is naked and straddling Donald Glover, a black actor.
If season one started setting up the foundation of Hannah Horvath's world, season two is breaking it all apart. Without giving much away, here are some observations from the first few episodes. I watched these about a week ago with a few girlfriends and more than a few glasses of whiskey—these are some of the thoughts that remain:
- Charlie has ditched his good boy smile for a gruff, bearded smirk. And the new demeanor isn't just for the screen, at the party earlier this week, we spotted Christopher Abbott looking tired, broken, and depressed... which obviously made us much more attracted to him. Assuming he's okay: hoorah! Sad Charlie is hot.
- Lena Dunham gets naked or basically naked three times in episode one alone. This is a great thing—first of all: why not? Secondly, Dunham isn't a size 0, so she is helping many young women climb out of the self conscious pitfall they've fallen in to. But if you are on the shallow side and feel something negative rising up your throat as a reaction to this, please read that Linda Stasi piece of vitriolic garbage and ask yourself: "Is this the kind of person I want to be?"
- There is one reference to Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (in regards to Glover's character's right wing tendencies), but it's fleeting, just like any 20-something's interest in that book.
- Shoshanna needs to CHILL. THE FUCK. OUT. Zosia Mamet is taking that character into some new orbit of over-the-toppism. Hopefully an Ambien addiction is on the horizon for her sometime this season because O-M-EFFING-G she has become a zany caricature of her season one self.
- Prepare for a Duncan Sheik comeback! Or at least prepare to have this song burned into your brain crevices so hard and so deep that you end up loving it in like a cultish "I didn't mean for this to happen" way—so much that you pry your eyelids open with toothpicks or tape or whatever's laying around at the end of the night just so you can keep listening to it forever.
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Jen Carlson
Jen Carlson is a former WNYC and Gothamist editor.
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