So should I just stay in this position for a while?
Pilot, Girls
Everyone and their mom is talking about Lena Dunham’s new show, and I am so glad! She is funny in a low-key way that is super underrepresented in like—a room with just Chris Rock and Robin Williams in it. I worried (after seeing on IMDB or something that Tiny Furniture was classified as “Tragicomedy”) that people would just be like, “She’s not shouting… so I guess she’s not telling jokes?” But now Judd Apatow is all mentoring her and HBO is all slathering her in publicity and thank goodness.
The thing is. The thing is I didn’t like the pilot so much. It is not because there are too many white people in it, though, and I am so tired of hearing that. Look how a) rich b) privileged and c) casually entitled she and her homies are! Hundreds of years of baseless white person self-confidence backing you would DEFINITELY help get that mix going—where you think your parents should support you indefinitely because “everyone’s” parents do that. You can fall back on the whole, “Well, when great-grandma was working on her poetry about trading calico for other calico, great-GREAT-grandma supported HER indefinitely! And now the world has Little House on the Prairie!” It makes sense that Hannah’s perspectiveless ahhhhtist self would spend a lot of time being white with all her friends.
Where the show turned me off, potentially forever, was when everyone started talking about working at McDonald’s in a weird out-of-touch way like they were all collectively the Shah of Iran. I am so not on board with liberal arts grads who are too “educated” or too “proud” to work at McDonald’s. McDonald’s might not have a massage chair in the break room or meat in their burgers conventionally speaking. But sometimes you need money. To eat. And then you do not just like, submit extra vigorously to McSweeney’s (by putting all your submissions in… bold?)—you go work at fucking McDonald’s! A world, even a sorta satirical world, where that is not the end of the story makes me grumpy. Too grumpy to watch the show, maybe. I just want Lena Dunham’s character to get off her lazy, unconventionally beautiful ass that the entire internet is talking about looking at and WORK A JOB A JOB.
