Neida Teresa

Below is an essay I wrote on Girls in 2017:

There’s a scene halfway through the first episode of Girls, HBO’s Lena Dunham-driven dramedy about twenty-somethings in NYC just “figuring it out,” where the main character Hannah has anal sex in a dingy apartment. I remember watching the show, crouched in front of my father’s old gigantic television, the kind of TV so big and boxy that it’s either always shouting at you or on mute. It made a satisfying sizzling noise when it turned on or off, like the fizz of popping open a fresh can of Coca-Cola. This was the sound it made as Adam, one half of the essential on-again off-again pairing that the show was in part constructed around, pulled off Hannah’s leggings and crouched behind her. I’d heard footsteps outside the bedroom door, probably just my dad going to use the bathroom, but they spooked me because I was watching something that I was definitely not supposed to watch.  

I watched the show for the first time in the ninth-grade, my own year of just “figuring it out.” I was working out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life and how I wanted to walk down that path when, in the middle of the school year, I saw countless articles online about the show. Titles like “HBO’s ‘Girls’ is the Best Show on TV,” “Why Lena Dunham’s ‘Girls’ is like Nothing On TV” “HBO’s ‘Girls’ Depicts a Wasteland of Sexual Promiscuity” jumped out at me. 

That was the year that I decided that if I watched so much TV, I may as well try to make it myself. Almost immediately after making that decision, I devoured articles written about Dunham doing exactly what I planned to do when I grew up: writing, acting in and directing her own TV show. She was so young, only 26, and seemed to be in charge of her own life and career. I tuned into the first episode as a sort of instructional manual. 

I watched the first three or so episodes in five-to-ten-minute bursts, pausing, muting or shutting off the television any time I heard shuffling outside of the room I was in. Like the angsty English teen dramas that I’d watched before it, Girls was one of the first shows I’d seen where nudity, sexual activity, and drug use were a regular part of the programming. Picture me, impressionable young teen that I was, with a ruby and pearl crucifix bracelet dangling around my wrist as the bright blue light of Hannah Horvath’s bare chest and butt danced across my face from the television screen. I was scandalized, but also intrigued. 

The show felt like a window into a world I’d never consciously had access to. Like the articles I read said, it was like nothing I’d seen before on television. The women on the show lived on their own, ostensibly supporting themselves. They had sex, frequently and out of wedlock. They didn’t graduate college and jump straight into work, marriage and childbearing as I thought women were expected to do. Over the course of the first two seasons, each of the titular girls’ neat plans for their lives derailed and they somehow dealt with it, taking time to themselves to be selfish and scared and confused and just figure out who they were.

When I was younger watching TV, I rarely saw women as independent as these. The only other show that came close for me was Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but even in that one the writers found a way each season to make Buffy dependent on a different man for validation (a supposed extension of her “daddy issues”). Within those first two seasons, the girls on Girls had relationships, but none of them seemed tethered to them. They had devastating heartbreaks, sure, but at the end of the season, what was most important to them, or at least what was supposed to be most important to them, was their relationships with one another. 

When I started watching the show, I saw the articles criticizing Dunham for its lack of diversity. I put off reading them until after I’d finished watching the first season. I was enjoying the show so much that I didn’t want to ruin my experience by looking too critically at the criticism. I knew when I did that, the fun would end. Through multiple articles, Dunham defended the entirely white upper middle class cast by saying that she wanted to write a show that reflected her experiences; she couldn’t tell stories she wasn’t familiar with, but she promised to make changes in the future. I accepted this excuse cautiously and promised to conserve my judgement until I saw the second season of the show.  

I waited excitedly for the first episode of the second season to finally play on HBO. It came on directly after the broadcast of the Golden Globes where Girls won its first and only award for Best Television Series—Musical or Comedy. Near the beginning of the episode Hannah, played by Dunham, has graphic sex with Donald Glover.

I remember being paralyzed with shock as their naked bodies appeared on the screen. This is what she calls diversity? I thought to myself, Her fucking some famous black guy who is never seen or heard from again? This wasn’t someone in a position of power at a large network giving an unknown actor of color a multi-episode arc that could have launched said actor’s career in television. This was someone attempting to fix a problem they didn’t really believe existed in their work by having gratuitous on-screen sex with a flat character that added nothing to the show. Girls continued to be dominated by white, upper middle-class actors after Glover’s appearance, with the occasional fiery Latina or dragonish Asian woman appearing to break up the beige. 

Shortly after watching that episode, the cracks in the surface of the show started to appear for me. This was a world where women could be independent yes, but it was also a place of people who—despite supposedly having barely enough money to survive—brunched on the Upper West Side, went shopping frequently and purchased expensive drugs and alcohol. Within the first season of the show, the three of the four main characters, Hannah, Marnie, and Jessa were all unemployed at least once, but there was a lack of urgency to their unemployed status that seemed to me to be a sign of a safety net in the form of their parents wealth. This was a blanket of generational wealth masked vaguely by personal struggle. 

I found myself starting to resent Dunham and her co-stars as I continued to watch the show. What began as a genuine interest in the characters, plot lines and Dunham’s success as a young show-runner turned into a hate-watch, something I tuned into only to scoff at the entitled-ness of the white liberal elite. Every negative trait attributed to Hannah on the show, I attributed also to her creator. When I investigated the backgrounds of the main people on the show, I realized that, like their characters they all came from families well-established in the arts and entertainment world before breaking through with their parts in Girls. I came to resent that too, to see their families as an invisible but all too real foot in the door that gave Dunham, Alison Williams, Jemima Kirke and Zosia Mamet the freedom to “risk” their financial stability and well-being by working in entertainment. 

In some ways, I learned how to be the kind of person I want to be from Girls, a woman who is complicated, complex and not afraid to work as an artist and seek independence. In spite of the show’s gaping blind spots, I learned how to exist as a woman in the world from a television show that would have had no space for me.