Girls World

I finished the last season of Girls this week. Six seasons of ups, downs, controversies - some very well deserved - and endless quotes, the voice of my generation had fallen silent.
It's potentially an unpopular opinion, but I love the TV show, Girls. I like Lena Dunham. Granted, she's a bit tone deaf with her feminism, she can be polarising to say the least. But the TV show she created with Jenni Konner and Judd Apatow - who forever holds a place in my heart as the creator of Freaks & Geeks - is magnificent.
Girls started whilst I was in my first year of university, a year I look back on as a learning curve. A year of fantastic, stitch inducing, laugh out loud memories and terrible, blocked off, shut away in a cupboard...events. I thought I knew who I'd grow up to be. Then I watched Girls.
The problem most critics have with Girls is its main characters. These four, white, upper middle class New York women who's biggest complaint was that nobody was paying them any attention. I loved it. They're flawed, narcissistic, self obsessed and moany. They have wobbly bits on their bodies, spots, terrible choices in boyfriends (yes I'm looking at you Jessa and Thomas-John). I loved it, because they were me. It shook me to see distorted versions of myself, who were so bloody impossible to like, but who I so desperately wanted to be. Jessa's hair, Shoshanna's clothes, Hannah's razor sharp wit, and well, Marnie dated Ray and he's the best. Watching Girls shaped me. It introduced me to Curb Your Enthusiasm, Louis CK, The Mindy Project, and maybe I started watching Extreme Makeover Home Edition in between, so I guess I kind of have Lena Dunham to thank for my now lifelong passion for the phrase "MOVE THAT BUS!"
Girls felt like the big sister I never had. Like the gentle whispered warning of someone who has been there. It's those episodes I like the best. Those jarring, standstill moments of television that put your heart in your mouth and your hand to your pearls. Episodes like this last season's American Bitch, that left me feeling speechless and dirty all in one, episodes that remind you that Girls isn't fizzy, happy, lols-a-minute, feelgood friendship. It's clunky, sad, heartbreaking and cringey, and it puts Elijah Krantz in a happy place for like three episodes, then rips him away, stomping on him and telling him to try again.
It's not a perfect show, it's thorny and problematic, but the final series surprised me with its grace. It felt rooted in indulging itself as a final farewell, and I couldn't have asked for more, until I could. The last episode of Girls, in a similar vein to Seinfeld and Breaking Bad, fell short. It went full force, guns blazing with the promise of a curtain call that it deserved, but it never got. Like a surf lesson with Paul Louis (played by the incredible Riz Ahmed), the set up was there, but then it never happened. Dammit, Dunham! I believed in you to pull this off! One great review of the finale ended with the summation "you think you know me, but you really don't," - a fantastic symbol for the breakdown of female friendship in season six, and the Brooklyn Mr Big, Adam's hopeless and at times hideous flip flopping between Hannah and Jessa.
I will always love Girls. I will always love Lena Dunham. I will forever wish Elijah was my best friend and that Ray made me coffee everyday. I will daydream about what would've happened if that Marnie episode in the final season ended the way I wish it had. And I will watch it again and again, knowing in the pit of my stomach that it won't end well. But then maybe that's the point. Girls is the best worst relationship I've ever had. Bittersweet and painful, and maybe sometimes worth the perverse peel back of the plaster that's been holding you together, in order to assess how far you've come.