Why ‘Girls’ made us hate millennials
The cast of characters on “Girls” were remarkably, unbelievably awful. If you met a single character from the show in real life, you would be talking about how self-destructive they were. . . forever.
That’s true whether it’s Jessa, who deals with her sadness by offering sex to a stranger in the bathroom of a bar, or Marnie, who married a man who consumed an entire bottle of OxyContin every day. Then there’s Hannah, who ends the series pregnant as a result of a one-night stand with a surf instructor. The surf instructor does not want the baby but does think it should be named “Grover.” And there’s Shoshanna, who almost failed to graduate from NYU and has drifted through her 20s without ever finding a real job.
These antics made for good television. It did not make for a good experience if you were a 20-something New Yorker visiting your family in the Midwest. In that case, it meant beginning every conversation with some variation on, “No, my life is nothing like the ones on ‘Girls.’ I am employed, do not have unprotected sex and no one ever offers me a job that hinges upon me doing a bunch of cocaine.”
Millennials — the generation born between 1982 and 2004 — have long been a punching bag for older generations who claim they are lazy and entitled. But if you look at the facts, that’s not so. Admittedly, there are millennials who are as relentlessly self-sabotaging as Marnie and Jessa and Hannah. But you’d have to look hard for them.
The cast of characters on “Girls” were remarkably, unbelievably awful. If you met a single character from the show in real life, you would be talking about how self-destructive they were. . . forever.
That’s true whether it’s Jessa, who deals with her sadness by offering sex to a stranger in the bathroom of a bar, or Marnie, who married a man who consumed an entire bottle of OxyContin every day. Then there’s Hannah, who ends the series pregnant as a result of a one-night stand with a surf instructor. The surf instructor does not want the baby but does think it should be named “Grover.” And there’s Shoshanna, who almost failed to graduate from NYU and has drifted through her 20s without ever finding a real job.
These antics made for good television. It did not make for a good experience if you were a 20-something New Yorker visiting your family in the Midwest. In that case, it meant beginning every conversation with some variation on, “No, my life is nothing like the ones on ‘Girls.’ I am employed, do not have unprotected sex and no one ever offers me a job that hinges upon me doing a bunch of cocaine.”
Millennials — the generation born between 1982 and 2004 — have long been a punching bag for older generations who claim they are lazy and entitled. But if you look at the facts, that’s not so. Admittedly, there are millennials who are as relentlessly self-sabotaging as Marnie and Jessa and Hannah. But you’d have to look hard for them.
