Black People Review Girls (2.1): A Letter From Joe To Kendra
By Joseph Lamour
Dear Kendra,
Did you have a good weekend? I hope you did. Mine was pretty great: friends, karaoke, laughter, moderately priced alcohol, and other 20-something stereotypes…Instagramming, there was definitely a lot Instagramming. So… Is it as foggy in New York as it is in Washington, DC right now? Because I’m feeling a little like I’m trapped in that Lana Del Rey video. Anyway…
I just wanted to break the ice before our season-long foray into talking at length about Lena Dunham’s Girls. I know, Kendra: the idea of Lena and Lena’s television program and requiring you to watch Lena and Lena’s television program for the site is a less than thrilling idea for a lot of people…and even less than less for entertainment writers like us who are attuned to TV stereotypes and diversity shortages. None of us were thrilled about the whole debacle last year. There was quite an article about it on the site, as you know—you wrote it, after all.
So, Kendra, I’ve watched the first episode of Season 2 already. I’ll let you know what I’m thinking, and I’ll wait for a reply with your own thoughts. We’ll be kind of like pen pals who are super-focused on talking about something neither is particularly fond of. Kidding, of course… sort of.
To the topic at hand!
Plot spoilers below the cut. You’ve been warned…
Here’s a fly-by recap, in case you want to have absolutely no surprises while you watch: the season begins by catching up with most of the girls of Girls–Hannah (Lena Dunham), Elijah (Andrew Rannells), and the result of Elijah’s preacher-curl regimen are asleep. Hannah is in bed with her gay ex, whom she’s now living with. Elsewhere, in her pink palace, Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) is waving a sage stick and cursing Ray (Alex Karpovsky) for being a jerk (one can only suspect–there are a lot of jerks in this show) after sleeping with her. While walking in Chelsea, a pretty black girl in a striped shirt takes all of my attention. I think Marnie (Allison Williams) just gets fired from her gallery in that scene…or something. Stripes is placed directly in the center of the frame, so she is all I see on the sidewalk, but maybe I’m looking too hard for minorities–or maybe it wasn’t an accident. I feel like there’s a joke here somewhere involving sandwich boards that read “diversity!”
We are then treated to a couple of scenes involving Hannah’s new man, Sandy (Donald Glover); the first being a sex scene; the second is a conversation showing how Adam is definitely going to ruin this thing with Sandy. I’ve been rather curious how someone like Lena Dunham would respond to the world after being asked over and over for months why she’s never met a black person. And the verdict? Sandy seems very much OK so far to me. The bookstore conversation between Hannah and him is by all means typical of a new relationship: we’re just looking at two significant others, one neurotic, and one in a beanie. Fine work.
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