Anyway, this all happened to a show called Girls on HBO. I'm going to assume you've heard of it even though it has an average viewership hovering around 850,000, mostly because the entire internet seemed to angry at it for like three days, which, in internet time, is sorta impressive. The thing they were mostly angry about, as far as I can tell, was that it was a show starring four white girls in racially diverse New York City. That they chose this show to get angry about and not, oh, I don't know, almost any other mostly white television show in all of American history is beyond me. (Actually it isn't but shh SPOILERS).
I honestly not sure what the detractors really want. In all honesty -- and I say this knowing full well it's going to come off as condescending but I can't really help it -- they don't seem to either have watched the show or, if they did, not really understand it. Girls is about a bunch of wealthy entitled white girls who live in a totally insular community of other wealthy entitled white girls. That's the whole point. I mean, if you don't really feel like watching that week-to-week, that's fine, but to declare it the Cultural Evil of the Week is fucking beyond misguided.
The single biggest mistake I've seen people make is assuming that Lena Dunham (the show's star, creator, writer, director, basically everything) wants us to be on her characters' sides, when at this stage we're not really supposed to be. Yes, the show's tagline is "The voice of a generation", but, if you watch the pilot, you realize that tagline is crazy sarcastic. For all we know, Hannah is a totally shitty writer with nothing to say. (Or she could be actually okay, who knows, we're three episodes in.) The point is, at this point in the show, she is wholly unprepared to deal with the world at all. When her parents cut her off, she goes to party, takes some opium, shows up to their hotel room and ends up on the floor simultaneously complaining that they need to start treating her like an adult and that she doesn't have to drink coffee because "it's a grown-up drink". You're not supposed to come away from this thinking she's a great person.
And here I come to that infamous Gawker review, an article so catastrophically dumb I'm not even going to link to it (Also I'm lazy and what are you, afraid of google suddenly?). The review is very Gawker-y, a lot of fake outrage over a perceived easy target because hey, why not. The mistake John Cook makes, though, is thinking that Lena Dunham equals Hannah. They undoubtedly share similarities, but that does NOT mean that they are the same person, or that Girls equals the memoir that Hannah is writing. Of course, it's automatically assumed that Lena Dunham is incapable of writing and playing a character that is not herself, or writing characters that aren't her friends in real life, because she has a big dumb vagina. This is a common problem for women artists, by the way: the assumption that their writing or whatever is autobiographical. All that's not important, though. What's important is this: You have to be a TOTAL FUCKING IDIOT to think that Girls somehow glorifies or otherwise tries to make these characters look cool. That's like watching The Shield and saying, "Wow, Shawn Ryan sure has a permissive attitude towards corruption!"
This all ties into Girls perceived race problem, I think. I don't even want to call it sexism, but something is causing people to get angry and Girls for having an all-white cast, and giving a free pass to, say, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. My feeling is this: Lena Dunham does not need to put any non-white people on her show. If she were making a show about the drug trade in Baltimore, or a show about post-Katrina New Orleans, it would be a different story. But she isn't. She's not even making a show about New York City as a whole, she's making a show about a bunch of entitled trust fund kids with no direction in their lives. You might not find that very interesting, but it's her show and it's her responsibility as an artist, I think, to tell the story she wants to tell, not to reflect the world as a whole.
Think about it this way: No one complains about The Sopranos being all white. That's because it's about a bunch of racist Italian mobsters. Girls is similar. The characters aren't racist, necessarily, but they're every bit as isolated from other classes and races of people as the characters on The Sopranos were.
Even if you disagree with that though, even if you think that all shows should have some sort of non-white presence no matter how awkward or counter-intuitive, you should at least agree that laying the blame at Lena Dunham's feet is a tad ridiculous. Do you know how many shows out there are mostly and/or all white? By my count it's ALMOST ALL OF THEM. I was going to make a list but didn't feel like typing out the entire Spring schedule. I mean, the show that airs right before Girls, Veep, has precisely one black character, and she barely has any dialogue so far.
The shocking whiteness of Girls isn't new or even distinct from anything else on TV. Our television landscape, hell our entire culture, is freakishly, garishly, and offensively white. It's a nasty side effect of living in a country that is still pretty racist. The problem isn't with Girls, or honestly even strictly with HBO, it's with everything. TV shows and movies without Tyler Perry's name on them generally aren't all that concerned with black people or any other race that isn't white. I'm not going to pretend I have any idea how to deal with this, except to say that I think The Wire proves that white people can watch a show with a lot of black characters and enjoy it, under the right conditions, so there's no real reason there can't be more of them, from a business perspective. (And, honestly, if they can't than we should really stop catering to them). I mean, I know of more than a few out-and-out racists who think Omar is totally awesome, man.
But whatever. Calling out Girls for being too white is stupid, I think, because it totally misses the point. Girls is a show that's really white because it's about really white people. That's sort of unavoidable. Girls isn't racist. Our society is.
Man.
