As the third season of “Girls” is set to start Sunday on HBO, we should all be familiar now with its quirky, outspoken, occasionally infuriating central cast of struggling young women in New York.
The new season finds creator and star Nena Dunham at the peak of her skills, creating solid, funny and satisfying episodes as each character faces new challenges. A fourth season was announced this week by HBO.
Still, there seems to be some lingering questions why Dunham spends some of several episodes without clothing. Such a question raised a fuss this week at the TV Critics Association summer press tour.
Dunham, for her part, shrugged off the question with aplomb.
“It’s because it’s a realistic expression of what it’s like to be alive,” Dunham said. But she added, “If you are not into me, that’s your problem.”
Of her characters, Dunham said, “I think that they accurately reflect people I know, people we’ve all been… I think that they are trying their hardest, which is sort of the most you can ask of the people in your life, and I feel sad when they struggle, and I feel happy when they triumph. And I’m excited by the unique ways that they fail and succeed.”
But she said she admitted that on HBO “we are not held to any standard of sort of sweet, female decency. We get to depict these girls in all of their, kind of, flawed glory.”
“It’s funny because people say a lot, like, ‘How do we sympathize with them?’ And I’m, like, ‘You seem to like Walter White.’”
Dunham says many of the plot lines are inspired by things that have happened to her or her friends (none of which involve manufacturing meth, which Walter White did on the universally acclaimed “Breaking Bad”). But, she added, “you’d be surprised how unwilling people are to notice their own bad behavior.”
Asked about the lack of diversity reflected in the show, Dunham said it was “an important conversation” and that “we are trying to continue to do it in ways that are genuine, natural, intelligent..”
But producer Judd Apatow jumped in, bluntly debunking diversity: “I don’t think that there’s any reason why any show should feel an obligation to do that. I think there might be some obligation to have shows about all sorts of different people, but if it’s organic to the show, then we should do it, and if we don’t have story lines which serve it naturally, I don’t think that we should do it.”
“It really has to come from the story and the stories that we are trying to tell. We want to accurately portray New York and groups of people. So we are going to do it where it feels honest to these characters in this world.”
As odd an idea as that was, producer Jenni Konner eventually piped up, changing the subject by saying, ” I literally was spacing out because I’m in such a rage spiral about that guy that I literally could not hear.’
She was talking about the guy who had asked about Dunham’s nudity at the top of the session.
“I was looking at him and going into this rage, this idea that you would talk to a woman like that and accuse a woman of showing her body too much. The idea, it just makes me sort of sick,” she said.
But again Dunham shrugged. “It’s whatever.”