There’s no use avoiding the main television event of this week. Clay Aiken had his hand up a puppet’s ass on “The Celebrity Apprentice” and everybody was talking about it.
No they weren’t. Who am I kidding? Everybody was (is) talking, texting, telegraphing and carrier pigeon messaging about Lena Dunham’s new HBO comedy, “Girls.” You can’t get away from it. Twitter won’t allow you to and Twitter is life. On Sunday night, the half-hour show about four, 20-something ladies in New York premiered to almost universal praise. “Dunham has opened the door for funny women in television,” “This show is all that and a bag of potato chips” and “I like it more than my ripening foot fungus” were what all the critics were saying — in my mind.
I’m not going to hype “Girls” here. Only one episode has aired. Give the show some time to develop. It’s too early to mark it as a seminal shift in the way women are portrayed, or involved, in television. At its core, “Girls” is hardly radical. It’s a simple show about young people and the joy of eating cupcakes in a bathtub — which is what youths often do.
Fox’s “New Girl,” ABC’s “Happy Endings” and MTV’s “I Just Want My Pants Back” are also prime examples of just this type of programming catered to those in their 20s and 30s. Besides including at least a smidge of racial diversity, these shows also do what “Girls” does — follow a group of friends hanging out, laughing and making hyper-literate pop culture references with maybe some sex thrown in for good, gratuitous measure.
It’s understandable why young people have become the focus of so many sitcoms in recent years. We’re pretty amazing. I sometimes wonder why my life isn’t a TV show. I’m 22, I fit in the youth bracket and all that map collecting I do must surely be relatable to other hip whippersnappers. In truth, I’ve pondered what makes this age demographic so seemingly compelling. Is it our unrelenting acne? Our vast consumption of popular culture? Our somewhat unstable living situations?
Among the many tweets (I hate myself for using that word) related to “Girls,” I saw one statement which succinctly summed up the solution to this dilemma: “‘Girls’ is about insular people.” All these young-people shows are. They feature a fairly exclusive group of people who have their own inside jokes, references and traits that make it difficult for any casual viewer to join in, say, in the middle of a season.
I don’t know how older people work. Sure, I watch “Antiques Roadshow” and I own a muumuu, but I don’t talk like people over 50. I speak, interact and relate, like many of my peers do, through popular cultural media. We bond over various YouTube videos, memes, certain shows, movies, books and maybe a secret murder we committed years ago that will forever tie us together. Like this murder pact, us young’uns are in a fairly exclusive club but, we have a strangely pervasive influence because of our extensive online networking.
More people between the ages of 18 and 25 are active on the Internet than any other demographic. I’m tired of using numbers in these columns but I’m pretty sure the percentage is around 301. I’m bad at math. Point is, youths are more active on the Internet. More TV is consumed on the Internet. More platforms for TV fans to vocalize their opinions are found on the Internet. And because the Internet is easily the most visible and accessible means of social communication now, those who use it have the dominant impact over other popular mediums — particularly television.
My roommate, during a rare moment of clarity, told me last night: “TV is now polarized.” I didn’t understand what she meant. For me, television has become a wonderful blend of the niche and eclectic interests I so cling to. But, for her, it is just another clique — no longer striving to reach a general audience the way earlier sitcoms did. In this new, insular and incestuous media world, I couldn’t even relate to the person sitting next to me. I could only relate to these fictional “Girls.”
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What’s this Girls thing you’re promoting? I was busy raving about Clay.
I’m going to catch the rebroadcast of “Girls” later this week because I just heard about it this morning, right before I read your article. It doesn’t sound like a show that I would enjoy at all, but just out of curiosity, I’m going to check it out. I have, however, been watching Clay Aiken work his magic on Celebrity Apprentice every week, and you were right when you said the Twitter world was following him. You must have known about it, too, or else you wouldn’t have mentioned it. So who are you kidding? Yourself, it looks like.
The “water cooler talk” is all about Clay Aiken and his puppetery skills on Celebrity Apprentice.
Never even heard of this new show “Girls”.
Why put down one performer that many enjoy to showcase another?
You only used Clay Aiken’s name to get people to pay attention.
You got your first paragraph right….until you negated it in your next paragraph. Everyone WAS talking about Clay Aiken and his incredible unexpected talent at improv and puppeteering on Celebrity Apprentice. The show itself is great fun, and Clay is terrific in it. There’s still a 1/2 dozen more shows to go, so if you haven’t seen it: NBC, Sunday nights, 9 pm to 11 pm. And you’ll be talking about “Celeb App” the next day, not “Girls”.