Girls: box set review

Girls, aka the Lena Dunham Show, is a tale about four mid-20s women in New York – and it's astonishing in a million different ways
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Jemima Kirke, Lena Dunham and Zosia Mamet in Girls
Lena Dunham (Hannah, centre) with Jemima Kirke (Jessa) and Zosia Mamet (Shoshanna) in Girls. Photograph: HBO

It's the Lena Dunham Show. The 26-year-old New York wunderkind created, stars in, executive-produced, wrote or co-wrote every one of the 10 episodes in the programme's first series and directed half of them. The easiest job on that show belongs to whoever has to write the end credits. It's just her, a handful of actors, her mentor Judd Apatow (co-executive producer) and a few guys to put the cameras where she tells them. And that's Girls, the tale of four women in their mid-20s in New York, struggling to cope with all the delights, madnesses, opportunities and disasters that those two situations can offer.

Dunham is Hannah Horvath, a neurotic ("What about the stuff that gets up around the sides of condoms?") wannabe writer whose parents withdraw financial support from her in the first episode in the hope that this will force her to concentrate less on the neurotic and wannabe parts and more on the writing. She's friends with uptight Marnie who is in the process of breaking up with her long-term, agonisingly caring boyfriend Charlie, nervy, brittle and uncool-to-the-core Shoshanna, and Shoshanna's languid, pitiless, British-ish cousin Jessa. Adam is her boyfriend, possibly ("I've never seen him outside his house. I've never seen him with his shirt on"), a monstrous and brilliant creation. Ray, the manager of the coffee shop at which Hannah starts working, having sabotaged a number of other, more appropriately writerly jobs, completes the solipsistic set.

Girls is astonishing in about a million different ways: for being the product of someone so young and inexperienced; for being stuffed with dislikable, dishonourable characters who move in an almost entirely affectless universe without alienating every viewer within the first 40 seconds; for being honest to the point of brutality (especially in the now-legendary sex scenes, which take every screen and social convention about what can and should be shown and reduce them to rubble); for its sheer audacity in dramatising a ceaselessly self-dramatising generation and never letting sentimentality or partisanship blunt its edge; and for still being as funny as hell.

Dunham came in for a lot of criticism, much of it clearly fuelled by envy of her raw talent and self-confidence, which can be dismissed without further note. Some of it centred on the narcissism and sense of entitlement of the characters, which can be counteracted by pointing out that to show something is not to condone it and which, especially as the season unfolds, is evidently not Dunham's agenda.

She was also criticised for writing only about her own kind – overprivileged white girls. The duty towards diversity is a subject far too large to begin to deal with here, but to my mind it is absurd to castigate Dunham for not managing to do everything in one bound, when she has succeeded in so much. Moreover, as feminist writer and activist Erin Watson once said of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique: "In my experience, people can speak profoundly well for themselves, and do both themselves and others a disservice when they try to speak for everyone else at the same time."

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