Two reviewers at Mother Jones have locked horns over HBO's new hipster all-female series, Girls. "Hipsters are really going to like this show," sneered Asawin Suebsaeng a few days ago. "Which is to say that it is as profoundly bland as it is unstoppably irritating." So Maya Dusenbery stood up to defend Girls, praising its "aggressively unglamorous hook-ups," honest portrayal of abortion, and "the easy intimacy of these friends":
Dusenbery: "The aggressively un-glamorous hook-ups in Girls are far more realistic than anything else on television."
Suebsaeng: The sex is "passionless," and "the central character is an unsympathetic victim of First World Problems who mumbles her way through ... missed orgasms."
Dusenbery: The show bravely breaks a cardinal Hollywood rule: "That abortion can rarely even be mentioned, let alone treated as anything less than the most difficult decision of a woman's life."
Suebsaeng: The "casual abortion" is part of the show's attempt to "throw everything at a wall (passionless sex, STIs ... boring boyfriends, gay boyfriends, drugs, money woes, body image) and see what sticks."
Dusenbery: "It's the stuff of a classic coming-of-age narrative ... except it's about girls. I'm not saying that's why Swin hated it, but it's definitely why I loved it."
Suebsaeng: "The inaugural episodes of Girls amount to little more than inertia disguised as quirkiness, stock narrative masquerading as art, and peskiness paraded as high comedy."
Read Dusenbery's or Suebsaeng's full reviews, or see general favorable notices from the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Hollywood Reporter. (More Mother Jones stories.)
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