Last week, I wrote a rave review of the pilot of HBO's "Girls" and got a fair amount of traffic for it. Since then, I've read mostly negative reactions to the show, both from professional critics and from some of my friends. By and large, these critics argue that the show presents a whitewashed version of Brooklyn, that the main characters are spoiled elites with no real problems, and that the people behind the show are likewise racist and elitist.
I can't really defend the disgusting "hipster racism" of writer Lesley Arfin, so I won't try. All I can say is that it hasn't yet made its way into the show's dialogue, and if it does I'll be plenty upset. Likewise, I guess it's bad that some members of the cast are daughters of the rich and famous, but it's neither unprecedented nor germane to the quality of the show itself.
Yeah, in general, can we talk about the show itself? Because it's not exactly news that some people who work in the entertainment industry are nepotistic assholes, and it's odd that this show in particular compels people to point it out.
There's an important conversation to be had about the entertainment industry and its persistent failure to tell worthwhile stories about people of color. Alyssa Rosenberg, who loves "Girls", makes that argument every day on her excellent blog. But it's worth asking why "Girls" has been asked to carry a responsibility that really ought to fall on HBO, not to mention every other network or studio that can't claim a masterpiece like "The Wire". This case was made innocently enough by Jenna Wortham at The Hairpin, who actually loved the show, and a bit more confrontationally by Dodai Stewart at Jezebel and Kendra James at Racialicious. James, who was two years apart from Dunham at Oberlin, writes:
We have our differences. She has famous parents, and sure, there's race. She's white. I'm Black. But Oberlin's a fairly diverse campus and, despite ridiculous tuition costs, those independent high schools are becoming a lot less white than they were. At Oberlin you could try and make your life and circle of friends look like the Girls poster or a scene from Friends or Sex and the City, but you'd have to make a concentrated effort. (And if you did that, then…well. We have other issues to discuss.)
I'm always a little mystified when I read statements like this, because while everyone would like to be able to say they have diverse friends, is it really so unbelievable that a white girl's three best friends would also be white? Does that require active effort on her part? I hadn't realized that our real society had become that integrated and that TV was lagging in presenting it as such.
I'm not denying the reality of interracial friendships (and yes, I have them, but I don't want to claim that as some huge point in my favor), but… how to put this… the vast majority of people I know are well-educated liberals living in major metropolitan areas. Most of them are white. Most of them socialize mostly with other white people. Most of them, if asked to name a small handful of their best friends, would name mostly white people. This is unfortunate, and it's definitely worth criticizing and interrogating, but I can't believe it's shocking to anyone. James thinks it would take effort to reach this state of affairs; I'd counter that it takes effort to avoid it, that most people would consider such effort potentially unseemly (hence the criticism of "tokenism" in popular culture), and that most of the time it doesn't happen.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, who also likes the show, seems to get this. His post is probably the fairest yet written about the presentation of race on "Girls":
With that said, I think storytellers–first and foremost–must pledge their loyalty to the narrative as it comes to them. I don't believe in creating characters out a of desire to please your audience or even to promote an ostensible social good. I think good writing is essentially a selfish act–story-tellers are charged with crafting the narrative the want to see. I'm not very interested in Lena Dunham reflecting the aspirations of people she may or may not know. I'm interested in her specific and individual vision; in that story she is aching to tell. If that vision is all-white, then so be it. I don't think a story-teller can be guilted into making great characters.
This selfishness tends to ultimately serve the writer and the audience. I think back to Friends, which for years, was dogged by criticism of its all-white cast. When its creators finally relented they casted two great talents–Aisha Tyler and later Gabriel Union–but didn't even bother to write separate story-lines. They simply recycled the same plot, and plugged in a new black girl.
Having dismissed cheap tokenism, Coates doesn't concede that we should be satisfied with the overwhelming dominance of white faces on television. He shifts the responsibility to where it belongs, with the executives who decide which shows make it to TV in the first place:
There has been a lot of talk, this week about Lena Dunham's responsibility, but significantly less about the the people who sign her checks. My question is not "Why are there no black women on Girls," but "How many black show-runners are employed by HBO?" This is about systemic change, not individual attacks.
It is not so wrong to craft an exclusively white world–certainly a significant portion of America lives in one. What is wrong is for power-brokers to pretend that no other worlds exists. Across the country there are black writers and black directors toiling to bring those worlds to the screen. If HBO does not see fit to have a relationship with those writers, then those of us concerned should assess our relationship with HBO.
All of that is exactly right. I'm going to take it a step further, and say that it's really unfortunate that "Girls" is being scapegoated for this old and systemic problem, because unlike many of the all-white shows on TV, it's actually a good show. And while many of the critics above are women of color who recognize that fact, many other critics have been white men who are demographically similar to Lena Dunham, and who seem a bit disingenuous criticizing these spoiled "white girls" (the second half of that formulation is the real tell).
Because lost in all this talk about race is another cruel demographic truth: while there are plenty of women on television, they rarely get to display the range "Girls" has so far shown. Before the past week of racial controversy over "Girls", most of what was written about the show was positive, and most of it concerned Dunham's willingness to show body fat on TV, to present bad sex from a female perspective, and to handle abortion and STDs with a casualness rarely seen in popular culture. These are all real breakthroughs, and it's taken very little time for the chattering class to take them for granted. You would think that the other girl-centric shows that premiered last season would be tackling these issues, but last I checked, Zooey Deschanel's "New Girl" is a conventionally beautiful schoolteacher dating a handsome, wealthy older man. That's fine, there are worse shows on TV (and "New Girl" has found substantial roles for nonwhite actors, to its credit), but it's not doing what "Girls" is doing. No other show is.
Also lost is the fact that "Girls" is, first and foremost, a half-hour comedy. It's not a political platform, it's not a text demanding to be deconstructed, it's not an hourlong drama with a big message. It's an offbeat comedy about four young white women. That doesn't mean it carries no weight; it does, both because there aren't enough comedies where women drive the humor, and because there aren't enough shows about millennials written by actual millennials. But still, it's a comedy. Dunham's character is not supposed to be a role model. She's supposed to be flawed and relatable. It's clear from her job interview and her gynecologist appointment in last night's episode that the writers are aware that Dunham is a spoiled, clueless child in some respects. How that makes her any more loathsome than, say, Larry David is unclear to me.
Finally, I want to address the issue of privilege, because in my post last week, I emphasized how Dunham's character seems less privileged than Winona's Ryder's character in 1994′s "Reality Bites", who at least had a paying job she could quit. Salon's Irin Carmon linked my post on Twitter and wrote the following:
And that's a very fair point, one the pilot addresses when a male character suggests there'd be nothing wrong with working at McDonald's (here's where I'd point out that the professional critics of "Girls" are paid members of a prestige creative industry, but I'll grant some of them may have worked at McDonald's at some point). But you know what? All Dunham's character wants is an entry-level job at a small publishing house or a trade journal, exactly the kind of job an English major who just graduated from a good college and moved to New York could reasonably seek back in the 1990s. All she wants is minimally compensated labor that could justify the investment made in going to college in the first place.
She's hardly unusual in seeking this out and being thwarted. A lot of writing about the current recession emphasizes that college graduates are doing much better than non-college graduates. That's true, of course, but then the vast majority of college graduates in the U.S. graduated sometime before 2008. According to a new study from Drexel University, more than half of all college graduates under 25 are jobless or underemployed. This isn't spread evenly among all majors, either; a humanities major like Dunham, or, I assume, most of her critics, is much less likely to find work than a math/science major. There's something gross about writers who were able to find paid work trashing Dunham for her sense of entitlement, and also blithely pretending that everyone with a B.A. shares their privileged status.
Wow. I just wrote 1700 words about "Girls". Here are just a couple more: it's a very funny show, and you should watch it.
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