I haven't written a lot about the HBO series "Girls" on here, the Brooklyn-based dramedy about four twenty-something women living in NYC. I was a fan, if not a big fan, of this show but it was always well-done, very funny, and quite insightful about the crazy minefield that is one's twenties.
Seeing it in my thirties gave me a grim satisfaction at having survived this miserable time. The thing about one's twenties, if you make it out, isn't so much that you've survived it but that you've been defined by it -- and will be, for the rest of your life.
Now it's over (the final episode debuted last night) and something occurs to me: the ending of "Girls" really marks, to me at least, the end of the Obama era more than the actual end of the presidency did. There was something about this show -- namely, its youthful energy, its cosmopolitan attitude, its celebration of tolerance -- that was reflective of that optimistic presidency.
The fact that "Girls" overlapped the very end of Obama's first term and the entirety of its second makes it a show firmly rooted in that time; that its final melancholic season occurs in the first days of the Trump nightmare shows that "Girls", like the Obama presidency, was a special thing that can only last so long. Eventually, darkness falls. Your youth ends. And then you go on.
Seeing it in my thirties gave me a grim satisfaction at having survived this miserable time. The thing about one's twenties, if you make it out, isn't so much that you've survived it but that you've been defined by it -- and will be, for the rest of your life.
Now it's over (the final episode debuted last night) and something occurs to me: the ending of "Girls" really marks, to me at least, the end of the Obama era more than the actual end of the presidency did. There was something about this show -- namely, its youthful energy, its cosmopolitan attitude, its celebration of tolerance -- that was reflective of that optimistic presidency.
The fact that "Girls" overlapped the very end of Obama's first term and the entirety of its second makes it a show firmly rooted in that time; that its final melancholic season occurs in the first days of the Trump nightmare shows that "Girls", like the Obama presidency, was a special thing that can only last so long. Eventually, darkness falls. Your youth ends. And then you go on.
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