Why Girls is the TV show all millennials should be watching

It’s the era of television. Binge-watching TV shows has all the hype these days and with this comes the obsession with celebrities. We love celebrities and even more we love the characters that they play. Our realities are now mixed in with the lives of fictional characters, so if we are going to idolize people that aren’t real we might as well idolize people that are at least realistic.

Girls is a TV sitcom on HBO that Lena Dunham has written, produced, and stars in. The show follows a group of young women who have a bond made in college and continue their friendship into their early adult lives in New York City. Sounds fairly average and mundane doesn’t it? Wrong. Girls is so different and much more quirky than anything you’ve ever seen on television before. The conversations that Girls will create in your group of friends will be authentic and intellectual because that is what the show inspires.

Other TV shows display such a disconnect from reality. GIRLS is what happens when Sex and the City meets the real world. No, Carrie Bradshaw, life is not all about the shoes and glam because if it was everybody would chase their dreams of becoming a writer. Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham) is a struggling writer who discovers herself in such an awkward and yet endearing way. You may not aspire to be this struggling young adult but you will feel all that she feels because Hannah gets you. She understands your sexual journey as a woman in your 20s and how confusing it can be – she understands what it means to fail time and time again and yet not lose yourself. That, my friends is admirable – to not lose yourself in times of adversity.

Watching these glamorous television shows aren’t necessarily detrimental, but when they seep into your life they become toxic. When you try desperately to make your Instagram posts look like those of Serena Van Der Woodsen from Gossip Girl or Alison DiLaurentis from Pretty Little Liars you have an issue. Why waste your time trying to force your life to look like fiction? The beauty of living is that we don’t have to play pretend. We can be raw and honest and vulnerable and people connect to that. People connect to what they understand. By attempting to fictionalize our lives we are becoming more and more unapproachable.

Just my friend Sam and I being our awkward selves

Girls stops this negative lifestyle for millennials. The show helps us see ourselves as beautiful in all our real-life glory. Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, and Shoshanna are all unique and vastly different from one another. Their friendship doesn’t always mesh in a perfect way. Their fights are hurtful and their lives all come together and fall apart many times because that’s life. They treat mental illnesses such as OCD with integrity. Hannah’s OCD doesn’t just make her apartment neat and trendy but instead infests her personality and her ability to succeed in life. Mental illness isn’t a trend and Girls isn’t afraid to expose that. The other characters sometimes act immature and are lost as well as they figure out who they are outside the security of their college bubble. The show may be awkward at times and a complete mess at others but the beauty in it is that you figure out who you are and who you want to be as you watch it.

You may want to be the Carrie or the Samantha of my friends group but if you are honest with yourself you already are the neurotic Marnie or the lost Hannah of the group and there’s something beautiful in that. As a millennial you’re still deep into the process of self-discovery so don’t pretend to have it all figured out because the truth is you don’t and if you think you do you probably watched too much tv.