Blame It On the Girls

Cards on the table: I started watching Girls after I saw Star Wars: The Force Awakens and wanted to see more of Adam Driver's weird, sexy face and thick, sexy body. I quickly binged the first four seasons and watched the latter part of the fifth season as it aired (read: as it was released on HBO Go). Last night, I watched the final two (sadly Adam Driver-less) episodes of the both season six and the entire series. My spoiler-free review: Ugh. But really, are any of us surprised?

The end of Girls was not a How I Met Your Mother situation, where a terrible final season and surprising and unfitting ending ruined a previously enjoyable eight seasons, or a Glee scenario in which a decent show slowly and steadily became unwatchable. The things that make the series so frustrating to watch are present start to finish, and by things I mean the characters.

The entire show is a dramedy about the experiences of a group of girls in their early 20s, which, as a girl in my early 20s, you'd think I'd be poised to enjoy, but the four eponymous girls in Girls are all so unlikable that, not only can I not relate to them, I can't pick which one I dislike the least. Shoshanna is maybe the least despicable, but she's still annoying and uncompelling at best. Jessa is essentially a standard Coachella attendee, who somehow manages to look upon all her fellow festival goers with contempt. Marnie is the beautiful yet self-absorbed and stuck up shrew that caricatures of rich housewives on comedy shows aspire to be. And then there's Hannah, who somehow manages to encapsulate all of the worst traits of the other three. She's annoying, pretentious and selfish, and her shenanigans are somehow more ridiculous than those of Ilana and Abbi of Broad City—characters who are intentionally ridiculous and farcical, and yet still more relatable and likable than the main characters of Girls, who, at least based on the show's tone, are meant to at least partially represent the personalities and experiences of actual 20-something women. 

With each episode, I found myself wondering if there ever was a show with less likable characters. Maybe a miniseries about the Third Reich, if the producers cut all the Schindler's List-y plotlines. But I will say this for Girls: Despite hating everyone in the damn show, I still watched it all, and am still talking about it, so I guess Lena and Judd win, albeit on a technicality. 

The kicker is that the penultimate episode, "Goodbye Tour", made me reconsider my assessment of the series. Between Shoshanna's declaration that she's moved on from her toxic relationships with the other three girls and Hannah and Jessa's final conversation acknowledging their mutual flaws, the characters, and more importantly, the series showed an unprecedented self-awareness. As I watched the girls dance around in Shoshanna's apartment, having seemingly made their peace with each other, I wondered: Could it be that six seasons' worth of mildly entertaining petty drama between irredeemably irksome characters was finally being paid off with this improbably heartwarming conclusion that also served as a commentary on the imperfect but still beautiful nature of humanity?  

Nope. The finale showed us Hannah and Marnie, now raising Hannah's baby, and somehow as terrible as ever. The moral of the story changed from "these absurdly irritating characters have reached some semblance of cognizance and we can hope that they will go on to be incrementally less irritating in their fictional futures" to "these absurdly irritating characters will always be exactly as irritating as they were at the beginning of the series, though it will become even more unrealistic and unlikable as they age." 

Sorry Girls—when I'm in the mood for the zany antics of young women living in New York, I'll be tuning in to the much funnier (and somehow still much more genuine) Broad City.