Girls Recap: Can We Have A Little Less Of Hannah Now, Please?

This is a recap of the most recent episode of Girls. Everything past this point = spoilers.

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Full disclosure: I am a female person, I am Lena Dunham’s age, and I have spent the better part of my 20s trying to Be A Writer. I currently have a job where I work with words, am remunerated fairly for doing so, and enjoy a modest amount of free or cheap snacks — but I do long for some alternate reality where editors and publishers are beating down my door to get at my unique take on life and culture, where a novel or a cultural treatise with something useful to say about the world spews forth from my brain even as I addle it with a cocktail of interesting pharmaceuticals and old-fashioned liquors.

For those reasons and many others you may have gleaned from these columns, I can relate to Hannah Horvath. I have more “Gurl, I KNOW” moments watching this series than I did during my whole Facebook lookback video. (I kid, I haven’t watched that shitshow and don’t plan to.) But she has been particularly exhausting these last few episodes – the gaffes, the tantrums, the grating lack of self-awareness that is so grating you actually feel like your skin is being grated off with a grater, revealing a raw layer of vicarious mortification glistening like a newborn gerbil.

The first two episodes of this season were pitch-perfect: funny and emotionally mature, in an awkward, new-shoes sort of way. The three since have been too Hannah-heavy – not so much Girls as Girl, as Dunham began arbitrarily up-ending Hannah’s new-found career success. (You can kind of understand why, from a narrative perspective: Hannah doesn’t deserve her success yet. She hasn’t worked hard enough, hasn’t suffered enough, hasn’t earned it – if she comes off as insufferable now, imagine the episode where she’s the toast of Brooklyn’s literary elite. Don’t you want at least one season between present-time Hannah and the inevitable Tao Lin cameo?)

We’ve had plenty of drama, but it’s been all about Hannah. How Caroline’s arrival affects Hannah. How Adam’s emotionality affects Hannah. How David’s death affects Hannah. How the perceptions and reactions of others to Hannah affect Hannah. We’ve been privy to all that outside of Hannah’s perspective, able to see Adam’s frustration and Caroline’s sparks of insight, and the fact that Hannah is being a dick and other people are noticing it. But from the party episode on, Jessa has been sidelined massively – she had no lines at the party, and has had one or two very brief scenes in each episode since, which seems to contradict the whole rehab/road trip thing where we learned how desperately Hannah needs her around.

We get brief flashes of Shoshanna’s quest for a regular boyfriend, which is sort of adorable and sociopathic in ever-shifting balance. She’s clearly coping badly with her self-perception after cheating on Ray, and then trying to not hurt him in the breakup with this old chestnut:

Shosh, while she’s not the most fully-realised or relatable character, could have had so much more of an impact. I would have liked to have seen more of her, not because I find Zosia Mamet particularly charming, but because she’s fallen the furthest from her perch of innocence and idealism. Her place in the foursome has changed from the pilot; she’s not only no longer a virgin, and she’s fallen in love with, cheated on and and broken up with an older guy. AND she smoked crack. You won’t find her babbling about which Sex and the City character she’s most like any more, either.

(For the record: While she originally claimed to be “a Carrie at heart” with emergent Samantha tendencies, she was a classic Charlotte with streaks of Carrie, only in that she believed reducing people to cute archetypes is a useful strategy for dating and life. Now she’s going the full Miranda: working super hard, dropping hard-eyed truth bombs on Jessa last week and now wandering Brooklyn archly pretending not to care about her scruffy ex.)

Marnie and Ray are getting the most non-Hannah screen time right now, and while whatever they’re doing is obviously going to blow up in their faces most horribly (their hilarious dive upon spotting Hannah and Adam’s doppelgangers reveals they know as much themselves), it’s actually the most interesting thing going on in the show.

The idea of them hooking up with sort of contrived and terrible to begin with, and the sex is clearly awkward and weird, and they have nothing in common beyond being lonely. Hannah apparently has as little interest in Marnie as she does in Jessa now; Ray’s on the rebound; Charlie has abandoned them both (Ray was his friend first, remember). And neither of them give enough fucks to switch on their filters around one another. That scene in the Chinese restaurant is the funniest in weeks, as they compete to simultaneously give the fewest fucks possible while also not wanting to leave.

And then there are the amazing one- or two-shot characters we’ve been treated to so far, whose brief flashes of snarking, barking brilliance are like rest stops where we catch our breath on our climb up to the peak of Mount Awkward & Whiny. Moe, of the unstoppable mirth! Kevin, who hates Hannah’s face! Jennifer “Kissing Jon Hamm” Westfeldt, as the widow whose terrible grief can be cut through with the knife of self-involvement! The star of Withnail & I Spiceworld The Movie and his terrible advice! Elijah, whose acerbic truth bombs I miss terribly!

And now Hannah’s advertorial editor (advertor?) at GQ, who is played with maximum aridity by J.Crew creative director Jenna Lyons, and makes me want to scooch forward 15 years or so and cast Kathryn Hahn as Miranda Priestley in a premature remake of The Devil Wears Prada.

Lyons apparently has a three-episode arc, so I hope that time is spent alternately crushing Hannah’s spirit and using her amazing ideas. (I know a guy who’s a total Kabballer.) You can picture the advertorial team standing round in the snack room, introducing each other to a new recruit by way of the achievement they’re secretly worried was their creative peak: “Hannah sold an eBook of autobiographical essays to Mill Street Press!” “No WAY!” cries the wide-eyed rookie. “Yeah,” shrugs a wry Hannah, dressed head to toe in J Crew. “But then my editor died and they canned it, but they still had the rights for three years, so it just stalled.” She nibbles whatever a Sun Chip is, and doesn’t admit that that was four years ago.

Meanwhile, Marnie’s cat is nowhere to be seen, and her apartment is not large. I hope it hasn’t been crushed by a vegan muffin/terrible sex.

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Girls season three screens on Monday nights on Showcase.

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Caitlin Welsh is a freelance writer. She has written for The BRAG, Mess + Noise, FasterLouder, Cosmopolitan, TheVine, Beat, dB, X-Press, and Moshcam. 

Follow her Girls recaps here.