A Thread About Girls (HBO)

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Vogue article

In Girls’s second season, Hannah had a brief but intense dalliance with a much older, very handsome doctor (Patrick Wilson) with a Zeitgeist-appropriate Brooklyn brownstone. Dunham was surprised to find how controversial their pairing became. “Critics said, ‘That guy wouldn’t date that girl!’ ” she explains. “It’s like, ‘Have you been out on the street lately?’ Everyone dates everyone, for lots of reasons we can’t understand. Sexuality isn’t a perfect puzzle, like, ‘He has a nice nose and she has a nice nose! She’s got great breasts and he’s got great calves! And so they’re going to live happily ever after in a house that was purchased with their modeling money!’ It’s a complicated thing. I want people ultimately, even if they’re disturbed by certain moments, to feel bolstered and normalized by the sex that’s on the show.”

I took issue with 'One Man's Trash' for reasons having nothing to do with the supposed "hotness disparity" between the two principals. I just do not buy that a chance encounter would lead to a weekend-long bangfest complete with naked ping-pong. I appreciate what she was going for in the episode, and I think it may have even been successful in an hour-long episode, but it didn't work as a 30 minute character piece.
 
I guess I must be the only one that really enjoyed the first two episodes of Season 3.

I haaaaaaaated Season 2! I kept with it, hoping it would get better, (and it did a little bit the last 2 or 3 episodes) but all-in-all it was a very disappointing season. So it was quite a happy surprise to me when, while watching the first episodes of S3, I found myself laughing out loud very loudly! That's the "GIRLS" I was missing! Season 2 just wasn't funny, and Season 1 had been so funny, so the lack of humor was glaringly apparent.

I know it's a bold statement for me to make, but these first two episodes of S3 were better to me than anything in Season 2!

For the first time in a long time, I'm excited about "GIRLS".
 
I guess I must be the only one that really enjoyed the first two episodes of Season 3.

Yeah, I'm sure you are the only person.

Oh wait, I posted about loving the first two episodes, in this very thread, like 9 fucking posts ago, and then irvine seconded my thoughts!

Do people not read threads anymore? I'm sorry man, your sentence there is just two huge pet peeves of mine rolled into one.
 
is it wrong that i really enjoyed this episode as well? and basically giggled throughout? and thought that Adam's sister was a visual response to Blarta and that she was like Hannah's evil twin?
 
I liked this episode as well, perhaps because the main women characters were less annoying (except for Marnie, ugh, who does that to a friend?). Adam's sister was really well-done. I felt like I knew that girl in college.

Adam remains my favorite character.
 
I've definitely come around to liking Adam more than I did at first. It might be because I've been seeing Adam Driver everywhere these days (which is a weird reason, but I guess I'm just getting used to seeing him?).
 
Adam and Ray FTW. I wonder if we'll get another episode with just them again this year? Having said that, Ray and Shosh's encounter was perfect. His rehearsed inventory of accomplishments before giving up the pretence and her befuddlement at the whole thing was heartbreaking.

I liked that Adam was still outraged at someone possibly abusing his sister, but if he really doesn't want her in his life why give her the address? Meet at a coffee shop, eesh.

The music was also fantastic this week, LMFAO and Marnie aside. I'm getting to the point where I dread seeing her onscreen, possibly because I emphasize with her the most.

Finally, did anyone see Looking yet? I'll get to it in the next couple of days, but after True Detective and Girls I was wondering if HBO pulled off a full frontal hat trick.
 
For anyone who thinks Jessa should be seen and not heard, this was the episode for you.

The show's built up a nice stable of secondary characters, it was great to see Laird and Tako (!) again.

It happened rather quickly but there was a moment where a black chick said hi to Hannah and she replied that she couldn't really talk right then. Wonder if this was the show trolling its diversity critics? (maybe reading too much into that)
 
Finally, did anyone see Looking yet? I'll get to it in the next couple of days, but after True Detective and Girls I was wondering if HBO pulled off a full frontal hat trick.


yes, i saw Looking and will be watching.

it could be said that Looking is to Queer as Folk as Girls is to Sex and the City. i think that's partially accurate. but it's hard to know quite what to think from the first episode, since not much happened and clear characters haven't yet been fully drawn. a friend of mine says he'll give me his opinion on the show just as soon as the show gives him something to have an opinion about. the characters all seem to be generally nice, gentle people who have everyday issues to work through. i don't think we'll ever see the craziness of Girls on this show.

it felt refreshingly realistic as a depiction of one specific slice of gay life (no one is ever going to feel as if all subcultures and identities are represented equally, and this is prestige TV, so everyone is predominantly white, good looking, well-dressed, great haircuts, cool apartments, etc.) it does avoid most obvious cliche and stereotype while also remaining grounded in certain aspects and realities, good and bad, of gay culture. it also reflects how much life has changed since the late 1990s of QAF (there's talk about how one of the characters feels hearing that an ex is now engaged), and it touched on the generation gap between men in their 40s and men in their 20s and how they understand themselves as gay.

if anything it seems a little too gentle. where Girls is harsh and sharp and written almost like a stageplay, this was soft focus and elliptical and impressionistic.

i have hopes, though. one of the best gay movies i've ever seen was Weekend, and the director of that film, Andrew Haigh, is in charge here. what was great about Weekend was that it was so matter-of-fact and naturalistic about two gay guys who happen to meet at a bar, spend the weekend together, imagine a better life with each other, and then it doesn't work out. it's heartbreaking in a way, but it's also so matter-of-fact that it feels ok because this is how life is.
 
I liked this episode much more than the first two. I'm intrigued by Adam's sister, and I thought the stuff with Hannah's editor was hilarious.

Wish Jessa'd had a line, though. While I wasn't enthralled with the first two episodes, I did like that we were getting some more information about her. I hope they spend more time with her this season.
 
I'd rather see Shosh written to the wayside.

I think she was the reason I didn't like the first two episodes. She is so fricking grating, I can't stand it. She sounds like a 12-year-old.
 
i know this is a thread about Girls, but since Looking came up, and there have been many comparisons made to Girls, not least of which by HBO by giving it the time slot right after Girls, i thought i'd post this here.

i find this a little bit too bitchy and rolled my eyes a few times, but some points are well taken:

If you came across Looking’s profile on Grindr, you’d want to talk to it. A cute face pic would catch your eye as you scanned the grid of indistinguishable sculpted torsos, and you’d click to expand. Kind, earnest eyes and a charming embarrassed-to-be-on-here smile would draw you in, and you’d scroll down to read the details. There’d be a moderately clever quote from an actual book or a personal description written in refreshingly solid grammar. “This guy seems worth a chat,” you’d think. It’s only after saying “Hi there :)” and receiving a smattering of dull replies and tired, dead-end questions that you’d begin to gather that this dude, though aesthetically appealing on the surface, is about as interesting as yesterday’s porn clip.

Though at least that bit of film had decent sex scenes.

I am not the first to make this point, that HBO’s Looking is an almost unbearably boring television show. Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times and Rich Juzwiak of Gawker have said so directly, and more positive reviewers have still intimated as much. But the adjective, one I would normally consider critically lazy, is so apt in this case that repetition is warranted. Looking is so boring, so utterly flat in terms of narrative or characterization, so in need of occasional pauses in which to perform a few jumping jacks to bring one’s heart rate up to resting, that I would opt out entirely if we gay men—or at least gay male culture critics—weren’t contractually obliged to watch.

Some of this, of course, is a matter of taste. Many viewers will undoubtedly find the muffled aesthetic that writer Michael Lannan and director Andrew Haigh have poured like molasses over their subject—the lives of Patrick, Agustín, and Dom, three San Francisco-dwelling gay guys between the ages of 29 and 39 who are all looking for “something real”—pleasingly subtle and sweet. For me, it is stultifying. Both positions are reasonable. In any case, after trudging through the first half of this season, I’ve realized that the profound boredom brought on by Looking does not stem from aesthetic disagreements, at least not entirely.

Juzwiak, a gay guy, compared his experience of watching the show to “paging through a magazine in a dentist's office.” That sounds about right. But why is that magazine in that office in the first place, and for what kind of customer was it intended? What are the cultural conditions that make a show with the characteristics of Looking possible or even desirable? How can a show so conservative in sensibility be lauded by critics as a progressive step forward in gay representation on television? To be blunt, how can a gay man watch a gay show this boring in 2014 and call it, with a straight face, “shocking”?

The answer, I think, has something to do with what exactly this show imagines viewers, gay and straight, to be looking for.

* * *

Let’s start with the gays.

If you don’t have HBO (and can’t find Looking through other means), you might find a good substitute in the YouTube show Will & RJ. Looking is, in spirit, a more expensively produced and slightly more coherent version of the Web serial, in which a gay couple records some part of their daily activities—a “slice of life,” as Haigh would put it—and presents the footage, without irony, as being worthy of your time. The explicit mission of Will & RJ is to prove that gay people are just like everyone else—which is to say, when they are playing with their pets or driving to the airport, just as unremarkable.

There was a time when this obvious truth may have needed stating—indeed, when speaking it might have been seen as a striking political act. But surely that time was at least 20 years ago. And yet, the fact that most gay people are “normal,” “real,” “the same,” or whatever other version of just as-lame-as-most-straight-people you prefer continues to be trumpeted by a certain contingent of the gay movement as if it were both a revelation and a passcode to the gates of utopia.

In a certain sense, Looking is what happens when you try to expand this argument—the core of the “post-gay,” nothing-unique-going-on-here ethos—into 30-minute chunks of television. But even if a gay person honestly holds such a limited view of themselves and their community (and many do), the question remains: What can be the appeal in watching a show that amounts to a lightly dramatized version of a press release originally meant for straights?

An oddly defensive Out magazine feature story provides a clue: “Looking does not rely on glittering wit, slick fashion, or edgy transcendence to power its storyline. It relies on the joy of recognition that sometimes accompanies viewing a well-calibrated reproduction of daily life.” By design, the show eschews elements that might be seen as artful or entertaining and instead depends on the peculiar idea that gay audiences should find “joy” in watching gay characters move from one (maybe slightly stressful) quotidian situation to the next. Looking’s great joy, in other words, is little more than the pleasure of the selfie.

Of course, seeing one’s identity group in media is important for all kinds of reasons—a bolstering sense of being a welcome part of the larger cultural imagination chief among them. But sifting through the more positive gay responses to the show, you get the feeling that Looking is being looked to not just for affirmation, but as a repository of insight into the modern gay male experience. If you believe the tag lines floating around, we are desperately seeking “real” images of ourselves, and Looking promises to be the place to find them.

But consider the “real” aspects of gay male culture that Looking so bravely interrogates in the first four episodes: open relationships, the potential difficulties of interracial dating, office flirtations, and aging. The last theme, embodied in the plotline involving Scott Bakula’s older character, Lynn, and 39-year-old waiter Dom, is the only one that feels remotely fresh, and I suspect much of that has to do with the quality of Bakula’s acting compared with the rest of the cast’s. Otherwise, it seems to me that if gay men find Looking’s perspectives on gay life in any way novel—forget “shocking”—it can only be because they have assiduously avoided becoming familiar with other (perhaps older) gay people and gay thought in general. All these issues have been openly discussed within the community for decades now, with a level of nuance and intelligence that, frankly, seems hopelessly beyond the kind of grown gay men who, as we see in upcoming episodes, have nervous breakdowns about foreskin or titter like teenagers at an institution as venerable as the Folsom Street Fair.

And so, back to boredom. It is not Looking’s somber lighting or idle pacing that truly bores me; rather, it is the laughable basicness of its presentation of gay male life and culture. For a gay viewer who has any real connection to that title, there is just nothing new to see here.

Indeed, the greatest irony of Looking may be that a show that is the apotheosis of the post-gay ethos has brought us characters about whom the only thing vaguely interesting is their homosexuality. Ask yourself honestly: If they were straight, would characters as thin and tedious as Patrick and Agustín still be on HBO? In attempting to escape the dreaded "stereotype," Looking has run headlong into something worse—a cynical tokenism, a gay minstrelsy of another kind.

* * *

Of course, the majority of HBO’s viewership are not gay men. This, in turn, means that the majority of those watching Looking may, in fact, be new to gay male romantic and social customs and thus not share in the boredom I’ve described. Still, though I cannot quite imagine what Looking looks like to the straight eye, the impression I’ve gathered from reviews by straight critics is disconcerting.

My Slate colleague Willa Paskin captures the critical gist in her review:

Here we are, simultaneously in completely familiar and unfamiliar territory: the bad first date that is, also, the bad, gay first date—and a bad, gay first date that is not the B storyline, will not be followed by scenes starring straight people, and does not feature stereotypically campy gay men. This would be enough to justify Looking’s existence on purely sociological grounds.
Paskin finds other artistic virtues in Looking, but I can’t shake the feeling that she and other critics are being unduly gentle because of the “sociological” work they think the show is doing. It’s true that having a program in which gay storylines are not tempered with straight ones as a matter of course is probably a good thing, but then, it’s worth considering what kind of gay storylines we’re talking about.

The continued bashing of “campy gay men”—who despite being somewhat overrepresented in older media, are just as real as (and far more engaging than) Patrick—is grating but de rigueur at this point: Neither Looking nor its audience need fear the queen—she has already sashayed on over to the isolation of Logo. Indeed, what’s fascinating about the show is how far its characters are pitched in the other direction; so far that, after Patrick’s two-second hand job or Dom’s brief and horribly photographed standing fuck is over, it would be pretty easy to forget that these guys have a queer bone in their bodies. Conveniently so, in fact. Patrick’s and Agustín’s and Dom’s couplings—with other men and to any sense of a larger queer culture or politics—are so ephemeral that calling Looking “progressive” in terms of gay representation is a joke. Queer as Folk, which premiered more than a decade ago, offered a vision of gay life that was more complex—and certainly more queer—than Looking even approaches, outlandish soapiness and all.

Yes, straight critics and viewers seeking liberal cred will find an easy tool here; Looking is, after all, gay without any of the hard parts (dick included), gay that’s polite and comfortable and maybe a little titillating but definitely not all up in your face about it. And in that, the show may represent the greatest victory to date of those who strive not for the tolerance of queerness in straight society, but for its gradual erasure as we all slide toward some bland cultural mean. Beneath the modern platitudes like love whoever you want and all families are beautiful, there’s a quiet, insidious demand that you blend in as quickly as possible. Don’t harp on the struggles of coming out beyond gay meccas, don’t complain about rampant homophobia and increasing gender policing, don’t lament the ongoing health crisis in your community—that stuff is too old-fashioned, too dramatic. Because some gay people can get married now, we’re past all that. And anyway, it gives your so-called allies a case of the sads.

You see, released in this moment of assimilation, Looking cannot just be a show about a specific circle of gay men; it is also unavoidably a PSA for how the mainstream increasingly expects gayness to look—butch enough, politically apathetic, generally boring.

That said, is Looking where the long and righteous campaign for decent gay representation ends—in, as Juzwiak put it, “gay men [getting] to be boring on TV at last”? The show itself could, of course, improve; the second half of the season remains a mystery. But if not, I can only hope it’s a misstep along the way to something better. For if the campy Stanford Blatches of old were, on some level, products of a culture that needed to see gay men as clowns, Patrick and his Looking companions are the product of a culture that doesn’t really want to see them at all.
 
Gawd the writing on Slate is so obnoxious.

I haven't watched Looking yet, but its 'bland tastefulness' seems to be a common complaint. I understand that line of thinking, but I can't buy that the vanilla characters of Looking are somehow worse than the outlandish stereotypes of yesteryear. I mean, Will & Grace was considered groundbreaking only 10 years ago and some of that stuff is pretty wince-inducing now. (I'd also guess the writer is in a bubble in regards to how far the country as a whole has made it on the progress scale). Anyway, it's unfortunate that we're still at a point where any representation of gay life is praiseworthy, but I still think it's good that a show like this can present a subsection of gay culture, however bland. Hopefully it gets things closer to a point where there are many more shows that depict all of the aspects.

To bring it back, I'd imagine the show would get much more flak if its characters were as horrible & self-centered as Girls. Actually, I'm surprised there hasn't been more criticism of Hannah's editor, who does often come across as a campy stereotype.
 
I'd rather see Shosh written to the wayside.

I think she was the reason I didn't like the first two episodes. She is so fricking grating, I can't stand it. She sounds like a 12-year-old.


Shosh is kind of mean this season. She says some really bitchy/***ty lines, especially to her supposed friends. I've always liked Sosh because, as annoying as she can be, she was always sweet.

But no longer.

I'm just glad this season is funny. Again with this episode, I was laughing out loud.
 
Adam and Ray are the only likable characters on this show, and either of them could go into a scary blind rage at any moment.
 
Another 'eh' episode, tho the last 30 seconds almost salvaged it. Hannah's poor attempts at human empathy were horrifying/funny/relatable.
 
A couple of great Hannah scenes this week with the funeral and her dad's phonecall (and by great I mean Hannah acts completely self-absorbed and awful)

Love that even Shosh is calling Jessa on her bullshit now

The Adam's sister storyline better have a good payoff because it is a draaaag maaaaaan

Marnie/Ray. Ugh. Inevitable, seemed they were hinting at it since mid-season 2. Get the feeling this show is going full-on Friends and just running through every coupling permutation
 
I was surprised to find this episode recorded by DVR from Saturday. That was a really weird HBO decision to air it a day early due to the Super Bowl. :huh:

That said, it was my favorite episode so far this season. I laughed out loud all the way through it. Maybe because Lena Dunham didn't write it? I don't know, but the characters were more real and funnier, and less annoying.
 
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