It’s starting to be a really good time for women in comedy. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler reign over TV, and female-led comedies like 2 Broke Girls and Whitney (both created by comedian Whitney Cummings) are thriving. I’ll even take the numerous jokes from the Golden Globes last night about how the poop jokes in Bridesmaids heralded the arrival of women’s dominance in comedy. (I mean, I guess that’s what we, as a gender, have been waiting for…or something.)
Last night, while waiting for the Golden Globes open thread to start, I was lingering around on HBO and saw a preview for their new comedy, Girls. I have to say, I feel pretty good about this show’s prospects. Girls was created by 25-year-old Lena Dunham, who based the show on some of her real-life experiences. As Hannah, Dunham chronicles the hilarious struggles of a young female writer in New York City and her best friends. The obvious comparison to draw here is to Sex and the City, which is intentional. According to Wikipedia, Sex and the City is referenced in the pilot episode, as the characters were inspired by it and moved to New York City to live the fantasy lives of Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda. Of course, they find out that you can’t really have an amazing apartment and a Blahnik habit on what a writer makes and high-powered PR executives and lawyers don’t have time to linger at the diner or go out for cosmos with their besties all the time.
Another cool thing about Girls is that it is produced by Judd Apatow, who has nailed the bumbling male adult comedy, but whose female characters were always a little out of reach for many audience members. They were always a little two-dimensional and played by physically perfect women, while Apatow’s male leads were allowed to be slightly overweight and not clones of Brad Pitt. Dunham is not rail thin and while I wouldn’t begrudge a running storyline about Hannah’s less than thrilled feelings about that, I hope that it’s not a main focus of the show. That would be dumb. But it looks like it’ll be just one of the aspects of early adulthood that Dunham attacks with a hilarious smirk.
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