I like everything to do with Chris O'Dowd. Otherwise...
Since the end of its first season, I've tried to figure what it is about Girls that irks me. I've never watched a television show that fights its viewership quite as hard as this one. While that sounds good on paper—really, I'm all for difficult TV—there's something about Girls that I find impossible to watch, or even explain. I wonder sometimes if I would like the show better if shown it in a vacuum, if I knew nothing about its origin and had read no commentary of it on the Internet. But as it is, everything I read about Girls makes me want to watch it less. So all of this week's ballyhoo about the terrible-sounding Season 2 finale got me thinking again. Because it's apparently impossible for me to speak coherently about this show, I decided on a very easy, very fun way out:
I missed last night’s Girls finale. Missed the whole season, in fact. This wasn’t due to any particular choice, it just so happened that after the first episode of the second round premiered, I had no urge to torrent it, convert it for use on my DVD player, and watch it on my incredibly fancy $40 TV. (That’s right—it’s a Trinitron.) The fact is, I just don’t like that show, and I’ve spent the last seven or eight months trying to puzzle out why.
There’s no good reason for me to dislike Girls. The show is funny, well-made, and occasionally features Chris O’Dowd. It’s about a place where I live and characters that are like people that I know. And Lena Dunham is ungodly talented—as a writer, but as an actor too. The show is sickening in a way that I like my television—sickening like Curb, like the British Office, like Peep Show—and yet it leaves me cold. The best answer I can come up with is a cop out, but a beautiful cop out, a cop out so elegant and wonderful that you will thank me for sharing it with you. Why did I lose interest in Girls?
Because I hate its stupid face.
For better or worse, it goes on from there. I thought I'd made a funny point. The commenters didn't agree, calling me "completely irrelevant," "an airhead," "embarrassing" and "really, really dumb." Well, you can't please everyone. Or, apparently, anyone. No matter. Because people hated it, that post got more pageviews than anything I've written for Bullett, which says more about the Internet than I ever could.