TV

Girls: Someone Needs To Help Me Figure Out If This Was Serious

The most recent episode of Girls aired on Sunday night, and I’m still thinking about it. It’s not because I’m preoccupied with the politics of the show, or even the plot. I can’t decide to feel about a single scene, and it’s driving me crazy.

The preview for the episode sets up the scene I’m talking about: Hannah, who is now in a relationship with the ever-shirtless Adam, goes to see him rehearse for a show he’s written with a friend. Take a look:

In the actual episode, we see Adam perform a scene from the show, and it’s…not good. It’s basically a sincere version of Barney Stinson’s one-man play from How I Met Your Mother:

So Hannah watches this go down, and she loves it. She tells Adam later on, when he’s thinking of quitting, “Do you know what it’s like to watch someone do something so open and honest, and you’re not making fun of them in your head?” That may have been her experience, but when I watched the episode I was so uncomfortable that I got up and finished watching the scene from a safe distance down the hall.

As ever, I can’t figure out how seriously I’m supposed to take the ambitions of the characters on this show. Is Hannah’s writing any good? I have no reason to believe it is, but I have a sneaking suspicion I’m supposed to believe that she’s talented, or at least has potential. The same question for me has come up yet again this week — is Adam’s show any good? Is he a good actor?

No! It’s clearly terrible, and so is he. There’s a difference between having conflicting feelings about a character who is inconsistent by nature, and being asked to look at an inconsistently written character, whose pretension and faux-philosophical beliefs are regularly set up for mockery, and take him seriously as an artist. If Adam is supposed to be a self-centered, goofy weirdo genius I’m going to need a lot more evidence of the latter and less of the former. It’s a shame, because this issue keeps tripping me up week after week and preventing me from enjoying so many other facets of the show (the realistic smack talk about Hannah from Marnie and Jessa, the offbeat romance between Hannah and Adam, and Marnie’s hilarious downward spiral into Facebook stalker-dom after her breakup, to name a few). I hope it gets fixed soon.

TAGS: girls | HBO

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