'Girls' on HBO is raunchy, and real

Enter "Girls," like "Furniture" a portrait of a city (still largely Brooklyn) filled with unemployed, overeducated 24-year-olds fixated on sex, drugs and pop culture. The series plays squarely against a zeitgeist of TV, Facebook, Twitter and especially music -- Jay-Z's "On to the Next One" is deployed perfectly in one scene, and The Troggs and Robyn track as well. The characters are all smart enough to know their lives are like an extended Stoppard play but don't care much whether it ends or just keeps on going. The humor is genial and observant -- like "Furniture" -- but you wouldn't always know it.

Dunham's Hannah, the series' POV, is wise but clueless, whimsical but neurotic, innocent but experienced. She's a bundle of exposed nerve endings that feel the manifest absurdities of her life but that don't quite know how to make sense of them either. Hannah and the show are all about internal conflict and so is the humor, while sex -- and fair warning, it's pretty graphic here, which may be the handiwork of Apatow -- is the metaphor for all that conflict. It's grotesque, malignant, unpleasurable and a particularly devious torture chamber, at least for the women, who still submit to it. As with "Furniture," the men are chronic dolts, wimps, hound dogs, hipsters, poseurs and especially comic props. But Dunham, something of an equal-opportunity humorist, isn't all that much kinder to her female characters -- or to herself.

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