HBO's "Girls": 1 Stop Shop For Girl Angst

It’s unlike me to watch a show that, oh, anyone is buzzing about. I am, after all, the sole viewer keeping the “Bachelor” and “Bachelorette” franchises afloat. And time doesn’t grow on trees. While the rest of you are viewing “Homeland”, I’m logging the hours over at ABC helping contestants like Emily and Sean find their soul mates. Except for this season, I am not.

Two nights ago, when the new “Bachelor” season premiered with that hunky Sean as the star, I was not among the viewing audience. For the first time in 7 years.

Because every season I follow the show and believe the fairy tale, only to find out several weeks after season’s end that the fairy tale was staged, and the contestants are fame mongers with no intention of finding true love. For us romantics at heart, it’s downright heartbreaking.  

So I downloaded the first season of HBO’s “Girls” and watched that instead. It’s this year’s most buzzed about show. It’s about a group of recent college grads struggling to find their way professionally, romantically and emotionally in that cakewalk of a city, New York.

Romantics, I’ve got some bad news for you. “Girls” and its depiction of love and sex will make you want to throw yourself from a bridge even more than those cheesy, hot tub scenes from the “Bachelor” . The guys in “Girls” are absolutely awful to our beleaguered heroines!

But that’s also part of what makes the show so gripping. You can’t believe they’re showing what they’re, ahem, showing. “Girls” is gritty. Read: no artsy dissolves. No lilting music that tricks you into believing a really sad situation is, in fact, fun and empowering.

“Girls” offers an unfiltered version of reality, one much closer to the truth of the exhilaration and desperation of being in your 20s, in a big city, with a wish for independence and a real life but no actual idea of how to get there.

It’s an interesting show. It’s a little bit funny, a little bit sad and a little bit nostalgic. One scene has you wishing you were that twentysomething, in Boston, meeting her fella for the first time again. But the very next one reminds you why you’re so very happy that you’re not.

Give the show a try. If nothing else, it should prompt some great book club conversation about how much things have changed for girls since we navigated those waters, back in the mists of time.

Have things changed?

How have they changed for the better?

How have they changed for the worse?

 And do you think that stupid “Bachelor” franchise is to blame for most of it?

 Discuss.