The return of Girls (Sunday, HBO Canada, 10 p.m.) is a bracing reminder that it is, and always has been, the most frustrating of cable-quality shows.
First: There is a point in many careers where the energy of ego, reputation and self-aggrandizement outstrips the energy of creativity. Such seems to be the case with Lena Dunham and Girls.
As evidence, there is a scene in the first episode of the sixth and final season of Girls that defines the point. Hannah (Dunham) is on the beach in the Hamptons talking with a cool dude, a surf instructor (Riz Ahmed from The Night Of), and it makes you cringe.
A bit blissed out, Hannah makes a little speech. "God, I was so ready to hate this," she says. Surfer dude interjects that hate is hard work but, "Love's the easiest." Hannah then says, "All my friends in New York define themselves by what they hate. Everyone's so busy chasing success and busy defining themselves that they can't even experience pleasure." Then Dunham, who hasn't really nailed down the nuance of the words or the scene, takes a swig from a can of beer.
You watch it and think it's so pompous and ridiculously, lumberingly obvious. You hate it for its gawky quality. You hate it for the nagging feeling that Dunham took on the voice-of-a-generation mantle that was pressed upon her, and ran with it all the way into puerile pretension.
Then, not long after, Hannah, in bed with surfer dude, discovers he has a girlfriend. He's so blithe about it. She takes a moment to soak it in. She was so naive and now she feels so awkward and stupid and yet not judgmental. This isn't a woman undone. It's a young woman struggling. And you forgive, utterly, the dumb, blinding obviousness of the earlier scene.
You recall that Girls is, after all, a comedy, mocking in its perspective on Hannah and her friends. Poignant at times, but in essence a cutting, hard-boiled comedy.
The first episode of the final season – it runs 42 minutes, by the way – starts with Hannah all self-satisfied and semi-famous at last. She's written a piece for The New York Times and all her friends read it.
As a reward, she gets offered an opportunity to write a magazine feature about the surfing scene in the Hamptons from a non-surfer, ironic attitude. The instructions from her editor are priceless. "I'm, like, a millennial Gidget," Hannah exclaims like a dork. She is, of course, clueless. And as usual, as things unfold, viewers get to see a lot of Hannah nude. A lot.
Meanwhile, Marnie (Allison Williams) is divorcing her husband and is sleeping again with Ray (Alex Karpovsky), but she wants him out of her apartment. This puzzles him. But Marnie explains she's been getting advice on this matter from her online therapist. And Jessa and Adam (Jemima Kirke and Adam Driver) are still together and increasingly, irritatingly hard to take by everyone. Viewers, too. Sometimes these relationship aspects of Girls seem rather like a lesser Carly Rae Jepsen song come to life.
Such lapses into inadequacy have always been the issue with Girls. The series was overanalyzed from the start, its freshness and self-deprecating humour about screwed-up twentysomethings, who are beset by white-people problems, being taken as an instance of revolutionary millennial feminism. Simultaneously, the series seemed intoxicated with its own insularity and therefore non-representative.
Lena Dunham was, some claimed, a leader, a thinker and a force for good, getting behind social and political causes and showing millennial women to be substantial figures. Others saw her as maddeningly self-indulgent and saw Girls as an excursion into privileged navel-gazing.
A few years ago, Dunham and executive producer Judd Apatow came to pitch a new season of Girls at the TV critics press tour. A question was put to Dunham about the motivation behind the amount of nudity Hannah indulges in. It was a fair question, not lurid at all. Apatow took the question, not Dunham, and excoriated the critic for even asking it. He was outraged on Dunham's behalf. She never said a word. Me, I remember being deeply disappointed that Dunham simply allowed a man to speak for her.
The first episodes of the final season are equal parts disappointing and a reminder that the world inhabited by Dunham's characters is grounded in reality. The characters are on the threshold between adolescence and adulthood. They're in a strange place in their lives, but it is a real place. Girls is often authentic, grubby and slightly sordid. These women are still working things out and cannot be condemned for that.
In the third episode, Hannah has a long and complicated Oleanna-like argument about consent and sexual harassment with a famous writer (played by Matthew Rhys from The Americans) who has strong views. Again, this is a character still working things out. It's unlikely anything will be fully formed – characters or tone – by the end of the final episode. Girls will stay frustrating.
Also returning this weekend
The Walking Dead (Sunday, AMC, 9 p.m.) is back and only this show could could swagger into a ratings battle with the 59th Annual Grammy Awards (CBS, City, 8 p.m.). It's still that strong. When we last left the show in December, Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) and his group of survivors were finally reunited – and determined to fight back, at last, against Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). This won't be easy and will certainly involve the all-female Oceanside community of survivors. Read what you like into The Walking Dead, but it is certainly about fighting back against a brutal, authoritarian leader right now. Bring it on.