girls
What: Premiere of the sixth and final season of Lena Dunham’s comedy.
When: 10 tonight.
Where: HBO.
What: Premiere of the sixth and final season of Lena Dunham’s comedy.
When: 10 tonight.
Where: HBO.
As “Girls” enters its sixth and final season, you wonder if its characters ever will grow up — or get a clue.
As the year opens, Hannah (Lena Dunham) has found success by writing a Modern Love column in the New York Times called “Losing my Boyfriend to My Best Friend.”
Having finally proved her talent, she gets a gig to write a story about a female surf camp in the Hamptons. Despite her expected distaste for sand and water, she meets a surf instructor, Paul-Louis (Riz Ahmed). After getting drunk at a party she ends up in bed with him.
The experience begins as the usual comedy routine. It seems that 90 percent of the sex scenes in the series start out like circus acts.
Paul-Louis is cool, and Hannah realizes as they later walk around the beach taking in nature that all her friends in New York define themselves by what they don’t like. Paul-Louis, though, offers a different challenge because of his surfer lifestyle.
Meanwhile, Marnie (Allison Williams) tells Ray (Alex Karpovsky) he needs to spend more time at his own place, which is just an excuse so she can hook up again with her ex husband, Desi (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) but that turns out to have unpleasant surprises.
By the second episode, the characters are telling each other to grow up and admitting they don’t know anything.
Despite all the ink the series has gotten over the years, “Girls” is essentially a hipster soap opera — occasionally clever or smart — but not as revealing as it led you to believe.
This year it might take the step that has been promised since its first season, but maybe not.
Episode three has a confrontation between Hannah and a writer (Matthew Rhys) she admires who she has taken to task in an internet article for rumors he slept with women on his book tour. For the most part, it’s a well-measured episode that takes a weird turn. It works in the short term because of the surprise and shock, but the whole thing is too facile to buy into and much of what goes on before fades.
Still, you will likely keep tuning in.
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