Signs "Girls" Whiteness Crisis Abating

A new article in the NYT, "Seeing HBO’s ‘Girls’ Without Buying a Television," somehow fails to mention that all four girls on Girls are white. Could this be a cultural turning point?

By the way, when is Roissy going to get his own sit-com? 

I don't know that Lena Dunham is directly channelling Roissy's blog, although I would think the odds are at least 50-50. Her characters certainly live in a Roissyesque universe, although perhaps that's because it's Roissy's world and we're all just living in it. (I like to hope that's not 100% true, but what do I know?)

Dunham has an interesting skill set. It's not hard to find young women who claim they will endure any humiliation onscreen to further career ambitions, but Dunham will do it while being overweight, funny, and smart. Plus she learned from her mother, an art photographer of dollhouse scenes, how to light sets and where to place the camera. (That's the point of calling her debut movie Tiny Furniture: her mother's career sounds silly, but helping your mother at a young age on her miniaturized sets is a cheap way to learn part of how to direct. Compare how grown-up looking Tiny Furniture was to, say, the Duplasse Brothers' Puffy Chair.)  

Dunham's character in Tiny Furniture / Girls is self-centered, obnoxious, and sluttish, but the sex lives of young women are so inherently important (this is where the next generation comes from) that there's a trainwreck-like fascination to it.

One key to making a Roissy sit-com work is to film it in Washington D.C., not L.A. or N.Y.C. There is so much money in D.C. these days that it's a now glamor destination for young white people, while also being comically unsexy: "C'mon, just one more drink" "Oh, you're so sweet, but I have to pull together some talking points for the Congresswoman on the helium subsidy."

The main issue with how Roissy could have his own show is that what makes him such an amazing blogger -- his infinite fecundity of lines in response to his acuity of observation, his sheer superiority and the obvious impossibility of mere mortals following in real time such advice as: "If she says X, just make up something that's witty, tailored to her, yet subtly discombobulating, like A, B, or C; but if she says Y, then make up something like D, E, of F; while if she says Z, then ..." -- would also make him insufferable as a major character in a continuing series.

The solution might be to make Roissy a legendary offscreen expert who has condescended to advise via text message three or four hopeless Big Bang Theory-like acolytes / losers in their quests. But in the presence of real live girls, they constantly fumble Roissy's lines to comic and endearing effect.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer