***Official TV sitcoms and Series recommendation thread***

[Penneywize]

@ Wuf I've never watched any "girls", just heard about it, and read a news article or two about Dunham. Enough for me to greatly dislike her and want her to fail somehow. Apparently she got a 3.7 mil advance on a book deal? For this bitch who (I've heard others say) can't write anything to save her life? Is Girls well-written? Or is it just a bunch of trite bullshit as I'm imagining it is?

[wufwugy]

@ Wuf I've never watched any "girls", just heard about it, and read a news article or two about Dunham. Enough for me to greatly dislike her and want her to fail somehow. Apparently she got a 3.7 mil advance on a book deal? For this bitch who (I've heard others say) can't write anything to save her life? Is Girls well-written? Or is it just a bunch of trite bullshit as I'm imagining it is?

It's not well-written and is mostly trite

Its only redeeming quality is some interesting dialogue and perhaps rare nifty social interactions, but it strays heavily from all the long-established aesthetics that make good storytelling and character construction. Every good story anybody has ever read revolves around protagonists struggling with conflict and the effects and resolution of the struggle, but Girls doesn't do much of that. Instead, Girls uses conflict flippantly and as a prop to give an illusion of plot and character development as justification for trying to be unique and write about entitled brats who do nothing but be entitled brats. Each episode is just a reset where the main characters learned nothing from the previous episode even though it was claimed that they did. But even then, that wouldn't be bad if it was a deliberate motif. But it's not a deliberate motif, it's just immaturity trying to act like immaturity is special

In one of the earlier episodes, Dunham's character claims she thinks she's "the voice of this generation". I think she actually means that, and she thinks she's being unique and expressive by making a rebellious show about a "rebellious" generation. That's an okay idea, but the way she goes about doing it is not. The way she does it is by using foils as an excuse to keep the protagonists the same. It's a strange idea since the foil is supposed to help drive development, not hinder it. The show basically flipped the character roles on their head and made the foils dynamic characters while keeping the protagonists as static characters.


tldr: the protagonists are static characters and the side characters are dynamic. The writers act like every day is friday, friday, gonna get down on friiiiday