My 7000th Post on GIRLS

HBO's Girls has been getting shit everywhere online due to it's nepotism in casting, succinctly showcased in this poster making the rounds. While it's fun to pounce on accusation because it's so easy, it'd have a lot more validity if the acting on the show was a problem.  Which it isn't. Sure the Mamet girl is a bit over the top and you wanna punch the main chick on principle alone, but the acting on the show is actually pretty good, especially in the case of Brian William's daughter. THIS article has some good points, including a zinger from professional weirdo Crispin Glover:

But there is also no way that HBO is going to give someone a TV show based solely on who their parents are. The channel that does that is E!

and the author of the post itself:

To be fair, these young women are famous within New York circles, but not to the public at large. Not everyone sees Mamet plays or goes to Bad Company shows, so to many viewers these girls might as well be unknowns.

While the industry inside-baseballness (TM Xmastime 2012) of the casting IS a bit much, it's not as if Lena Dunham demanded HBO simply let her three best pals be in the cast; I'd be way more into the eye-rolling if the acting was, in fact, palpably terrible ("Palpably Terrible" was, by the way, my high school nickname, but that's not important right now.)

What the problem of Girls, to me, is that it's the first show (in my mind) that sounds like a blog, in that it feels more of a need to cram in it's pithy observations on XYZ than it does in developing a story or characters we care about; you can feel Lara Dunham not listening to anyone else's lines as she's clicking dwon to her next "BOOM!" statement about boys/her vagina/Williamsburg. A blog can be compulsively driven by getting things off one's chest since there doesn't necessarily need to be a connection from one post to another, but a television show needs to organically flow.

This could/should change as the show progresses and Dunham feels less pressure to blurt out the first 100 things she's ever thought of (particularly as "the mind of her generation"); hell, Whitney began with Whitney tripping over everybody else to cram in as many clumsy-fitting one-liners from her stand-up as possible, but became mildly watchable once she calmed down and the other characters were given lives of their own, not just existing as receptors for Whitney's  endless "The difference between men and women..." schtick.