Lena Dunham’s Girls opens on its creator and star eating the way you don’t often see a woman eat on TV: brow furrowed, cheeks full, spaghetti cascading towards the plate, left hand free to catch any strands that might not quite fit in her mouth. Dunham’s character, 24-year-old Hannah Horvath, is having a meal in a restaurant with her parents, but there’s something of the break-up, or sacking, about the set-up. ‘How can I phrase this?’ Hannah’s father says, one hand circling like a politician’s. Often enough, sitcoms begin with main characters being dumped, or discovering they’ve been cheated on, or losing their job: it gets the story going, and gives you a chance to root for the protagonist from the start. Dunham’s version – she wrote and directed the episode – doesn’t aim for your sympathies in quite that way. Hannah’s parents are cutting her off. They’ve funded two years of Brooklyn living and unpaid publishing internships, ‘and that’s enough’. Hannah doesn’t take the news well: don’t they know how the economy is now, how all of her friends are still living off their parents, how close she is to becoming the writer she wants to be, how lucky the two of them are that she isn’t, say, a drug addict? Besides, she’s their only child, so they can afford it: ‘This feels very arbitrary.’ When they won’t budge, she announces that she can’t see them again before they leave town, because ‘I have a dinner thing, and then I am busy, trying to become who I am.’ The scene ends with her elbows on the table, fists to her now empty cheeks. Dunham has said that she didn’t want Hannah ‘to like, save a cat and then you find out she’s a brat. You know.’

LRB 8 November 2012 | PDF Download