BANGALORE: Girls. It's about four women in their twenties, fresh out of college, trying to figure life out in New York City. It's definitely like nothing you've seen before on television. It's painfully and quite uncomfortably true to life, maybe not for every girl, but definitely for every young urbanite who is struggling to make it on their own.
Created, written, and directed by Lena Dunham, who also stars in the series, the show becomes even more intriguing when you find out that she was 25 when the first season came out.
And it has created quite a stir, with people either flocking to praise it or take it down. These issues are quite disheartening: a show about girls in a multi-cultural city like NYC shouldn't exist in today's time, when it does not represent anyone but privileged white women. People of colour have been completely overlooked and it's not what you expect from someone like Lena Dunham. But we will let it pass, because this is after all just television. And great television at that.
So let's get back to what's brilliant about Girls. It pin points exactly the highs and lows of being in your twenties - the desperation of not knowing where your career's headed, the mix-ups in the romance department, the paralysing self doubt, the eagerness to please, the casual flirtations, and so much more. Girls takes all of this and takes it one step beyond.
Not once does it hesitate to talk about a topic like abortion, thrown into a casual conversation between two friends over the telephone. And it's done without any fanfare, without needing to dedicate an entire episode just to discuss a hot topic. It's discussed the way you and I would talk about it - a conversation that would be laced with fear and doubt, but also the comfort of knowing that you're not in this alone. These are things that happen in so many young girls' lives but no one wants to talk about it the right way, because we don't know how. Girls breaks it down for us.
It also looks positively at female friendships. Finally we have a break from all the bromances that we've been having to suffer over the years. Girls shows us that all female relationships are not about jealousy and bitching and talking about boys, although it might all be a part of it. The characters are allowed to be themselves, far from perfect, which in itself makes for perfect characters.
Girls celebrates the flaws of these women, thereby putting a mirror to all the false entitlement that the characters so wrongly feel about themselves. The show comes up with the strangest sexual adventures for its title character Hanna (Lena Dunham) and sometimes you have to look away from the screen, because it's all too much to take in. The guilt of the act, the self-depreciation, the strangeness - this is brave television at its best.
Most importantly, it lets its characters breathe. The plot's not driven by one major character. Cut-away characters like the boy friends and the bosses and the stray flings are all given the screen time they deserve and it's great to find yourself in the midst of all these people, because here's a chance that we might finally find someone we can relate to on television.
So, three seasons done and dusted, and fourth season on its way early in 2015, Girls is a must watch for any pop culture aficionado.