Camera is a little too candid in New York sitcom

Lena Dunham's new sitcom may be true to life, for a narrow white American elite, but it is too close to the bone to make anything but unpleasant viewing, writes ROSEMARY Mac CABE

IT HAS been heralded as Sex and the City for a modern, recessionary age – Girls is HBO’s pithy, sarcastic sitcom following the lives of four 20-something women living in New York. But instead of Sex and the City’s basic concerns – namely, love and sex – Girls concerns itself with more pedestrian matters.

The series is directed and written by Lena Dunham, who also stars in it, and Judd Apatow is one of the executive producers, which helps explain the critics’ preoccupation with the show.

It opens with an incredulous Hannah (Dunham), at dinner with her parents, being told that she is being cut off. “No. More. Money,” says mommy dearest, as Hannah explains to them the trials and tribulations of being an intern in New York city, to no avail.

Girls has been widely criticised for its distinctly “white” life view; like Sex and the City, its four main characters are white, affluent, middle-class women. (It is yet to be seen, of course, whether Girls will make a concession to the black community in America by casting an Oscar winning black actress in a role as servant to the central character. Fingers crossed.)

Perhaps the universal discomfort with the show itself is due to just how particular its world view is.

Hannah is not the only 20-something woman in the western world who relies on her parents for financial support; nor is she the only graduate who is engaging in an ill-defined relationship with a man with apparently poor personal hygiene, a terrible way with the English language, and an even worse way with the act of sexual intercourse.

Jessa – the British character, typically bohemian and fond of hats – is not unique in making bad dress sense look good while being infuriatingly flighty and, seemingly, helplessly attractive. Shoshanna is not the only 22-year-old virgin on the block; Marnie is not the only anally retentive art gallery worker who is tiring of her “too-nice” boyfriend.

Watching Girls is, for a certain group of women – mid-20s, university educated, fond of The Shins and Death Cab for Cutie, and pretending to have read all of Hemingway – a bit like catching a glimpse of yourself in a mirror you didn’t know was there. It’s an unhappy surprise when you haven’t had the chance to purse your lips in your usual fashion, widen your eyes slightly or suck your stomach in.

Here you are, the American equivalent of the Celtic Tiger kids and, boy, are you spoiled. If you are Hannah, you are unable to grasp the fact that your parents have lives and financial needs of their own; you make terrible, thoughtless jokes during your STI test – “maybe, all this time, I wanted to get Aids” – and you have the worst sex ever committed to celluloid with the worst male romantic lead ever cast.

The Jessa character will be known for her inability to keep appointments and distinct talent for picking up random strangers in bars – in other words, she’s what girls’ girls will refer to as a “guy’s girl”.

Being Marnie is the slightly more modern equivalent of being Charlotte – harmless but dull and perhaps slightly insulting, while Shoshanna is the slightly trailer-trash cousin with the penchant for Juicy Couture tracksuits and blind adoration for anyone “cooler” than her (read: everyone).

Sex and the City may have been shallow and vacuous, but it showed us at our best: coiffed and coutured and, as Samantha might purr, fabulous.

Girls shows us, not at our worst, but at our most honest: having horribly awkward sex with our maybe-boyfriend as he invents demeaning fantasies for us to act out; asking our boss, unsuccessfully, for a raise or, at the very least, a salary before falling into an uncomfortable hug; throwing a dinner party attended by a grand total of two people, who proceed to have a horribly awkward conversation about how they initially met.

For some, this is reality. But, frankly, I’d take Carrie’s fits of self-obsessed melodrama over this mortifying mirror any day.