HBO's ladies night with 'Girls,' 'Veep'

Times were different then, when the girlfriends of "Sex and the City" were masters of the HBO universe. All things seemed possible. Money and jobs were free-flowing. You could work at home, writing columns about piffle, and afford Jimmy Choo shoes! Life was good! Principled optimist Josiah Bartlet was president of the United States, and winning four best-drama Emmys! OK, so "The West Wing" and its idealized president weren't on HBO, they aired on NBC. But times really were different then -- NBC was practically HBO Lite!

Flash forward a decade to today's society, economy and public mood. Few things seem possible. Money and jobs are hard to come by. Cutbacks, downsizing, the game keeps changing. Life's a joke. And so's politics, with its poison polarization and ugly expediency. Never have so many voters wished so desperately to choose None of the Above.

Today's HBO universe gets all of that. This month, the pay cabler debuts two half-hour dramedies that resonate as fresh, sometimes freaky windows onto the world as we know it (but actually might rather not).

"Girls" arrives Sunday night at 10 with a cast of four good-time chicks a la "Sex and the City." But these unglamorous Brooklyn 20-somethings aren't having sex in the city with such abandon. Fresh off their all-about-me childhood/college idylls, they've been kicked hard into an adult world, wher -- wham! -- nobody cares about their needs. Nor do the girls have much of a clue about their own identities or direction. Crafted by 25-year-old series star-writer-director-producer Lena Dunham (the bargain-budget indie flick "Tiny Furniture"), "Girls" is a raw, naked (often literally), improv-style slice of life, where humor and humiliation emerge in equal quantity.

Crossed signals

Its unrefined documentary feel also marks April 22's new "Veep" (10:30 p.m. on HBO), the farce in which "Seinfeld" icon Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays ex-senator turned vice-president Selina Meyer. Just one rung under The Leader of the Free World, Selina finds herself hustled through her days by a whirl of aides dithering less over public strategy than political signals. Which frozen yogurt flavor for a photo op? What would Jamaican rum say?

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The minutiae of the moment consumes both protagonists, ever distracted by daily process as big-picture goals recede into the distance. Their operational cues come from Oprah and 24/7 cable TV news, second-guessing every action or utterance to death, utterly fixated on things that don't really mean anything, until they come to define everything.

The shows capture "where we are culturally regarding women and politics and sexual politics and relationships," says HBO Entertainment president Sue Naegle, put in charge of the premium cabler's original programming four years ago, when lots of long-run series were ending, with little of sizzle to replace them. Martin Scorsese's "Boardwalk Empire" was on the way as the latest splashy period piece, but what could truly define Naegle's HBO in the way that, a decade earlier, "Sex and the City" and "The Sopranos" had? Pop-culture buzz was percolating instead over at premium rival Showtime, suddenly charging hard with "Dexter," "Weeds" and "Nurse Jackie."

Fortunately, Naegle had helped put together the creative team for "True Blood" as a United Talent Agency partner before moving to HBO in 2008 -- just as "Blood" creator Alan Ball ("Six Feet Under") was juicing up his swamp soap into a gaudy must-see of vampire blood and conspicuous sex. Last year, HBO introduced "Game of Thrones," another apparent "genre" hour with its fantasy-world politics, yet another across-the-board smash whose storytelling helped sell George R.R. Martin's saga to the mainstream.

Half-hours were something else. With reliable "Curb Your Enthusiasm" on long hiatus, HBO tried "Bored to Death," "Hung," "Eastbound and Down" -- nice, but no cigar; nothing to speak to/for a generation as "Sex and the City" and just-ending "Entourage" had. Naegle was looking for something where "there's a bravery in the comedy, and there's a purity in the vision, which, to me, is a trademark of HBO at its best." She wanted "that feeling of singular vision."

Which "Girls" brings in excess. Its guileless attitudes and natural feel seem to spring from of-the-moment auteur Dunham as spontaneously as sweat, which her scripts certainly make her character, Hannah, do. "I am busy, trying to become who I am," Hannah proclaims, as both a boast and a whimper, when her parents cut off the money supporting her two years post-college as an aimless "intern." Hannah's roommate has a job and a boyfriend, yet is no less adrift, currently agitated that her boyfriend is "so nice to me, it makes me feel angry. . . . His touch now feels like a weird uncle putting his hand on my knee." Hannah botches job interviews with date-rape jokes, seeks awkward sex with her not-boyfriend, and babbles to her gynecologist that if she had AIDS, at least nobody would be pushing her to find a job. Sighs the gyno, "You could not pay me enough to be 24 again."

"Girls" rambles and rolls, yet gobsmacks viewers with blunt turns of both phrase and activity. "It's the feelings, it's the honesty," says Naegle, who couldn't grab Dunham fast enough to partner her with executive producer Judd Apatow, king of the (guy) slacker universe. Naegle thinks the show nails "trying to figure out your id. When I watched this as a 42-year-old woman, I felt like I understood that experience. These people felt like me at that age, allowing myself to make mistakes, alternately harshly judging what I did and being permissive to myself about finding my way."

Muddling through

There's way-finding in "Veep," too, and not just by Louis-Dreyfus' title figurehead. Series creator-

director Armando Iannucci (2009 movie "In the Loop") portrays Selina as the befuddled locus around which the show's various young aides revolve, incessantly thumbing their smartphones, jockeying for secrets, status and better jobs, hopefully not with "one of the most respected perverts in the Senate." Are there any ideals in this office? Would it matter if there were?

And where does that lead us? This feels like the tack to which HBO has turned, after years of depicting people who've been around the block, trying to maintain what they have or figure out what it means. These two new shows aren't about kids, but the characters don't act like adults, either. They're from that new and nameless post-college group so often today living at home, on their parents' medical insurance. How do they move from here? What shape is their world going to take?

HBO is now forging its own future by portraying ours.

More big HBO news: Aaron Sorkin's new show

BY DIANE WERTS, Special to Newsday

If HBO seems like girls, girls, girls this month, just wait.

"Aaron's show coming on this summer has a male lead and a female lead," says HBO Entertainment president Sue Naegle, talking about "The Newsroom," arriving June 24.

Aaron Sorkin, who's been busy writing movies like "The Social Network" and "Moneyball," returns to television with a wallop. His previous shows, all on broadcast networks, dissected the workings of the White House ("The West Wing"), sports TV ("Sports Night") and sketch comedy ("Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip"). Now for HBO, Sorkin takes us behind the scenes of a cable news operation -- at a time when the political slants of CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and even Current are increasingly under debate.

Jeff Daniels ("The Answer Man") stars as a seemingly detached cable news anchor, who suddenly throws a verbal bomb into the cultural discourse at a public event. Emily Mortimer ("Hugo") co-stars as his new producer, battling for fair and truthful coverage amid corporate/ commercial pressures. "We're going to do a good news show and make it popular at the same time," she declares, as Daniels jumps all-in to "fighting the good fight."