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Groundbreaking brilliance – or offensive display of white privilege? The furore over Girls, 10 years on
Lena Dunham’s comedy-drama won rave reviews for its unflinching depiction of millennial life – until its lack of diversity caused outrage. A decade later, we explore the show’s legacy
‘Why is everyone struggling in New York?” Hannah Hovarth asks in season one of HBO’s coming-of-age comedy-drama Girls. Back in 2012, it was a question that – to fans and the many journalists who gave the show rave reviews – felt very fresh. Lena Dunham’s look at the trials and tribulations that come with adulthood in the Big Apple – which launched 10 years ago today – wasn’t the first of its kind. But while shows such as Sex and the City – and its all-Black counterpart Girlfriends – had explored similar ground 10 years earlier, there was something about Girls that felt different.
“If Sex in the City is the celebration of a post-90s feminism that celebrates money, consumption, sex and over-the-top feminity, Girls is the rejection of that,” says Jorie Lagerwey, professor of english, drama and film at University College Dublin and author of Horrible White People; Gender, Genre and Television’s Precarious Whiteness. It was an unflinching portrayal of millennial life that sought to uncover what lay beneath the veneer of the American dream. The recession of 2008 betrayed a generation of people and so, where Carrie Bradshaw masked her romantic issues with copious cocktails and $500 Manolo Blahniks, Dunham chose a more radical approach by foregoing masks all together. It embraced the warts-and-all truths of a specific generation of women.
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