Watching Girls & Eating Its Everlasting Misery

There's a certain type of TV that I have weird feelings about. Stuff that has a strange blend of bleak and silly, something that feels like falling down the rabbit hole the whole time I'm watching. Girls is like that for me. I watched it when it was originally airing until somewhere in the middle of season 4, where I left it because it just made me feel sad. But recently I decided to watch it through from beginning to end, and whilst it still very much has that ambling, soulless, destructive, and almost soap opera level dreariness to it, there is also this quality of the bizarre and dreamy that pulls me in.

The best way I can think to express this is by comparing it to one particular scene in Skins, another show that gives me a similar sense of discomfort and voyeuristic, creepy yet hushed weirdness. The whole of Skins has so much grossness and callousness, but there's this one scene in a later season where everyone has run off so that two of the characters can get married on a whim and they come upon some abandoned building with a piano in it or something and they dance around in the beautiful shafts of light created by the tall windows and they're all wearing lilac bridesmaid dresses and it's a little moment of beauty nestled inside so much cringe and pain and exploitation. Girls situates itself in that kind of place, and it's mesmerising.

I wish it didn't go quite so overboard with the twists and turns and the constant relationship swapping, especially in later seasons, but I guess that's what Girls is. It's completely chaotic, it's a mess of sometimes funny, sometimes sweet, sometimes incredibly awful stuff, and whilst that was basically too much for me when I first watched it, now it feels like a strange nod to how life is. I mean, it's completely melodramatic and over the top, but the disjointed, crumbly nature of all of the tangled narratives does feel like a wry smile in a dark place now. In many ways, it's like a shrug in TV form, and there's a weird delight to that.

And Grover is obviously the perfect baby name.