Why did it take Girls so long to find Itself?
Girls has never felt as relevant and worthwhile as it does right now
Our thoughts on the final season of Girls so far have been made plain, but it’s not entirely clear how we got to this point. Sure, there are people who that have always been with Girls, since the beginning, and there are also those that were worn out by the very first season and jumped ship. Girls has been something of a curiosity; offering a constant flow of good and bad, contrived and natural. But now here we are, at season 6, and the show finally knows what it wants to do it. And exactly how to achieve it.
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Even those that stuck with it all these years can admit that season 2 was not very good. We’d go further with that and say the series didn’t feel like it was coming together until the end of season 5, and even then we were wary of it self-destructing, as that is the characters’ usual want. The characters on Girls come much closer to being endearing than they do likable – Shoshannah is a good example of this – and that can make viewer engagement difficult. It would be easy to say that Girls didn’t change – our expectations did. Or our tolerance, perhaps. And while maybe there is some truth to that, it’s also not the whole story.
The story of Girls as a TV series is not all that different from any other fledgling show – it needed to figure itself out and just what it was trying to do. If it were only a regal network, or maybe any other premium network, it would have been canceled long ago. It turns out that it’s not so easy to make a show about a group of narcissistic 20 somethings millennials in New York City and still carry some emotional weight.
Next: Adam and Jessa return for Girls episode 4, 'Painful Evacuation.'
Really, the journey of Girls finding itself mirrors that of an actual young person. That’s a little corny, yes, but it fits all too well. This isn’t going to be the show that people describe as being great, or as a must watch, but it is the show that will be considered worth watching. That doesn’t mean it’s for everyone (it never has been) but the payoff has been very much worth it.