Wednesday 25 April 2012

Girls, What Gives?

So there's this show. It's called Girls, and like, it's kind of a big deal.




...Which is to say it's been making waves. Both good and bad.

I've been writing a series that is about the same point in life, but approached from a totally different angle, so I've been rubbing my hands together and watching this show's successes and failures as a near-case study of my own show's potential reception.

It's been a grab bag of feedback, and I can't help but catch the whiff of pissy jealousy from the internet peoples who have been raging on about the show...

I'm going to ignore the positive feedback (which it got tons of), because hey, no one cares about being positive! The first negative thing I saw was a photoshop-ing of the poster:


"Huh..." I said to myself. Then followed with "Who the fuck is Laurie Simmons?", and finally, "Do I know a single Bad Company song?! Where they from the 80s?"


Dafuq people?! First off, since when has nepotism NOT been part of the industry? Or ANY industry for that matter? Almost every job I ever got, whether it was bartending at the El Mocambo, or selling soap dispensers at Umbra was because I knew someone who worked there and could put in a good word for me... If I'd had any brains I wold have gone into computer hardware design so I could take advantage of all the nepotism my dad could generate for me...

Secondly, aside from being the daughter of a newscaster on NBC, none of these actresses have had an "in" so great as to be called nepotism. Seriously, who the fuck is Laurie Simmons?! (for those interested, wikipedia shows us the light) Also, if being the "daughter of the drummer from Bad Company" gets you the lead on a tv show, I wonder when kids of the Moody Blues are hitting the silver screen?

At this point I have to consider the possibility the show is shitty. Why else would the interwebs be raging with the fire of a thousand overheated pizza pockets? So I pulled out my trusty HBO on demand and watched the first episode... IT WAS GOOD. Not amazing, not "oh my god Imma poop myself"- amazing. (What is though? Ew.) But for a pilot that was written by, directed, and starring a 24 yr old woman...?

Lady got mad skillz, yo.



Dare I say it...is it just possible that some people out there in the world of interwebs are a wee bit jealous?

And another complaint I've seen flying around is that the show's 4 lead girls are all caucasian. Well, not to be an asshole, but here's a list of shows that no-one seemed to give a crap about being whitewashed:

  1. Sex and the City
  2. Friends
  3. Entourage
  4. Seinfeld
  5. Cheers
  6. Arrested Development
  7. Two and A Half Men
  8. Modern Family
  9. How I Met Your Mother
  10. Bored to Death
  11. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

 The point I'm trying to make is that it seems a little odd to single out this one show, after only 2 episodes, and call it racist when the VAST majority of popular television has the same amount of non-white representation...

Frankly, I can't get the idea out of my head that a bunch of guys in their mid 30s are looking at a 24 year old girl who does not fit the ideal of mainstream beauty, and are jealous as fuck that she has more talent in one chubby little finger than they have in their whole (debatably pudgy) bodies.


She's fat. And racist. Where's my Code Red Mountain Dew?






Lena Dunham, I think you're the bee's knees.


No resume required.

Now...give me a job.




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