resembling

OK, so it's Saturday morning and I'm sick, and watching the pilot episode of HBO's Girls, and it's very rainy outside. I like the dialogue and the situations the characters get trapped in because it's very urban (they live in Greenpoint, Brooklyn) and quasi-literary (Hannah interned at Melville House and this is evidenced by the stacks of Tao Lin books displayed around the office) and also very cosmopolitan (Jessa flew from Greece to France — oh actually she did a week in Bali — and then to New York) and has very Judd Apatow humour, like if McSweeney's shorter fiction came to life, this would be it. 

The problem that most people have with the series is that it's a show about white people and their post-college, pre-employment problems. It doesn't depict the racial diversity in the location that it's set in, or the experiences of women across race, sexuality and socioeconomic class, despite the inherent claim in its title to a broad spectrum of experience. But it isn't so much the lack of representation that is the real issue — after all, sometimes some people just have friends of similar colour, duh. It's the misrepresentation of non-white individuals, or reliance on new urban stereotypes, that I have a bone to pick. For example, the other intern at the publishing house is Chinese/Korean and she is mocked for being good at Photoshop and her apparent insensitivity (she doesn't realize Hannah is leaving because she had just lost her internship). These two obvious traits about her, the only traits we can know about her, are played up for laughs. 

"Where are you going? Will you get me a lunar bar? And a smartwater and vitaminwater?"

And in another particularly striking moment, a nameless black man tells Hannah to smile more.

We are given the impression that he is one of those crazy folks you meet on the street. Still, he speaks one of the more meaningful lines in the episode, because, you know, Wisdom From The Gutter.

Thus, in Girls, the only Black man in New York is mentally unsound, and the only Asian girl is an insensitive nerd. That said, these are rather unfair points of critique based on the viewing of just the pilot episode, but if it's any indication of what is to come, then the series — no matter how brilliant its portrayal of an urban, coming-of-age experience in arguably the most expensive city in the world — started off on a racially dubious note.