Girls and the City

I spent the summer after my junior year of college in Durham, working at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and hanging out with my friend Deena, who was living down the block. The boys she was living with had sprung for HBO, so I spent a lot of time there watching TV on nights when we didn’t have anything else to do. That’s how we saw, over and over, the promos for a new show called “Sex and the City” and that’s how I found myself on her couch at 710 Buchanan at the beginning of June, 1998, watching the first episode.

My friends and I would go on to watch every episode of “Sex and the City” at watch parties at the house or apartment of whoever happened to have HBO, whether I was living in Berkeley or San Francisco or New York City, with my high school friends, college friends, or business school friends. We would discuss whether we were a “Carrie” or a “Miranda” the way my own kids would eventually discuss whether they were a Gryffindor or a Hufflepuff.

The pilot, which I just rewatched, is a time capsule. Carrie’s 90s brown lipstick. Miranda picking up sad chicken wings from a bodega salad bar. Everyone smoking everywhere. As Charlotte gets into a cab at the end of her date, I spied a sign for Jerry’s diner in SoHo, a place on Prince Street I used to go to with my aunt Darline when she lived around the corner.

There are parts of “Sex and the City” that I think about all the time: Lexi falling out the window; Carrie’s shoes getting stolen at the baby shower; none of Carrie’s friends coming to her 35th birthday party; how Carrie asked Aidan not to talk to her for a few minutes when she walked into the apartment; “I couldn’t help but wonder…”. I think Charlotte would say that she was the only grown-up out of the four of them, but really, Miranda grew up first: getting pregnant, getting married, moving to Brooklyn (gasp!), taking responsibility for herself and others. We will not be discussing the subsequent sequel and how it undid everything special about these women and their friendship. Who knew that Samantha was the glue holding them together?

Fourteen years after “Sex and the City” debuted, I would watch another, very different show about four girls making their way through New York City, through jobs and relationships and heartbreak. “Girls” aired in mid-April of 2012, when I was already married with a three-year-old son but probably before I knew I was pregnant with my daughter. I can’t remember if I watched the first episode, but I know I watched the whole show. I didn’t need watch parties at friends’ apartments; now I had HBO.

I rewatched the “Girls” pilot, too, and maybe it’s because it’s more recent, or because no one is breaking the fourth wall (a tactic they stopped doing on “Sex and the City” pretty quickly, thankfully), or because there’s no voice-over, but it still felt really lived-in in a way that “Sex and the City” rarely did. The character introductions were so natural, the relationships felt so specific; you weren’t left wondering how these three women (and, ultimately, Shosh, perhaps the best “girl”) knew each other. I did appreciate Shosh’s gushing appreciation of “Sex and the City,” but also how Jessa had no idea what she was talking about.

Maybe “Sex and the City” walked so that “Girls” could run, but I don’t think anyone ever wondered if they were a “Hannah” or a “Jessa.” It’s also not entirely fair to compare them—Lena Dunham created the show, starred in it, wrote the lion’s share of the episodes, and directed a bunch of them. She was responsible for so much of it, at the incredibly young age of 26.

Now, in the present day, I tore through Lena Dunham’s memoir Famesick, which digs really deep into her life as she made her first films and the time she spent making “Girls,” specifically her relationship with the showrunner for “Girls” and also her relationship with her then-boyfriend Jack Antonoff. It also digs really deep into her own health issues, mental and physical, and her relationship with her parents and her younger sibling. Some of it was hard to read, in the way that reading about self-destructive behavior can be hard to read, but because many of the events in the book happened more than ten years ago, even the author has some emotional distance from them.

At age 26, I was in the middle of business school, living with two strangers, doing unpaid internships, subsisting on student loan money and the free pizza we’d get at the Marketing Club events. Sometimes, I still have an anxiety dream that there is an economics class I didn’t finish. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to be responsible for a cast and crew of hundreds, for someone taking my written words and realizing them. But mostly, I can’t imagine growing up under the scrutiny Dunham felt, which probably didn’t literally make her sick, but certainly contributed to it.

Now that I’ve watched the pilot for each of these shows again, will I continue down that rabbit hole and commit to a full re-watch, all six seasons of each show?

Abso-fucking-lutely.