Girls: The Complete First Season

Creator-writer-star Lena Dunham offers a very different perspective on life in the Big Apple than HBO's previous femme-centric comedy series, Sex and the City, focusing on four educated young women from middle-class backgrounds—aspiring writer Hannah (Dunham), art gallery assistant Marnie (Allison Williams), and cousins Jessa (Jemima Kirke) and Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet)—who are measuring the distance between their aspirations and their realities, with frank and sometimes discomfiting humor. Dunham assigns most of the humiliations to her own character, who puts up with a self-absorbed boyfriend named Adam (Adam Driver) and wants her parents' financial support so she doesn't have to quit her (unpaid) internship and get a job while she continues to not write her novel. Girls isn't much like its sister shows—the sex here is awkward, the romance is uncomfortable rather than cute, and there's a lot of settling for the status quo rather than insisting on something better. As the Golden Globe-winning first season progresses, the four main characters—and the men in their lives—gradually become more interesting. Compiling all 10 episodes from the 2012 debut run, extras include audio commentaries, interviews, and a behind-the-scenes featurette. The Blu-ray release adds audition footage, deleted scenes, and bonus DVD and digital copies. Recommended. (S. Axmaker)