Far and
away, Girls is Andrew Rannells’s most
substantial project. He appeared on all
six seasons of the HBO dramedy, starting out recurring but gaining screentime
every season. Normally, when I’m doing
actor reviews, I’ll do all of their episodes from a particular show together,
but since I’m going more chronologically with Rannells, I’ll split Girls up by seasons as they fit into his
career. Here, we begin season 1, which
he filmed while he was still in The Book
of Mormon (note: I won’t be able to
say much of anything at all about his character without spoiling a particular
twist from this episode, but after today, I’ll try my best to keep Girls spoilers to a minimu.)
Girls follows the lives of four young women: Hannah and Marnie a few years out of college,
Jessa who dropped out previously, and Jessa’s cousin Shoshanna who’s still in
school. They wrestle with jobs/careers,
relationships, and just generally figuring out where their lives are
heading. In this episode, Jessa and
Marnie both have surprising encounters at work, while Hannah has a surprising
one in her personal life. Having
recently discovered she has HPV, she reconnects with Elijah, a college ex that
she thinks might have given it to her.
However, before she has a chance to broach the subject, he
misunderstands her intentions and “confirms” the rumors he assumes she’s heard
about him, that he’s dating a man.
I’ll just
speak quickly about the episode in general.
At this point in the series, the four titular Girls are still sort of being introduced. They’re generally painted in broad strokes –
uptight Marnie, free-spirit trouble-maker Jessa, quirky/neurotic Hannah, etc. –
but the individual characterizations have enough specificity to make me
interested in them. As awful as most of
them are much of the time, they still have a watchability about them.
Point of
interest – prior to watching the series, I’d heard but had forgotten that Adam
Driver, a.k.a. Kylo Ren, appears as Hannah’s sex buddy. The first time I watched, it was so weird to see him for at least the
first season, but eventually, I was able to see his character (also named Adam)
rather than the angsty dark lord. This
time around, he fits more fully into the show, even as Adam the character is
himself an odd sort of tangent at this point in the series, with him and Hannah
having mini-bottle episodes whenever they share scenes together.
But
enough about the episode. It’s an
interesting show, and I enjoy it, but I started liking it a whole lot more the
second Rannells’s Elijah hit the scene, and that can’t be solely explained away
by my bias. From his first scene, Elijah
pops onscreen. He’s a funny character on
first meeting, hyper-polite and really careful about his words, even when they
don’t work out the way he plans, i.e., mistakenly assuming Hannah already knows
about him and his lover. He misguidedly
tries to reassure Hannah about her body by comparing her to a dumpling and
later, quasi-explaining his sexuality, uses the noncommittal description, “I’m…
with a person of my own gender.”
Elijah
puts up well with Hannah’s initial shock (and crying) over this revelation, but
it’s when he finds out about the HPV – and more particularly, Hannah’s
accusation that he gave it to her – that we start to get a better idea of who
Elijah is. Even as he freely admits he
can’t know for sure whether he gave Hannah HPV, he starts getting catty, which
she freely feeds into, and we see the beginnings of the time-honored tradition
of Hannah and Elijah’s occasional habit of hilariously bringing out the worst
in each other. She accuses him of having
“become” far “gayer” than he ever was in college, and he in turn makes winking
insinuations about her dad. When we
first meet him, it maybe feels a little surprising that Hannah and Elijah were
ever a couple, but as their night devolves and ends with Elijah bitchily
insisting on getting the last word, I can see the energy that probably put them
together back when Elijah was further back in the closet.
Recommend?
In
General
– I think so, as long as you don’t mind lots of HBO-ness (swearing, sex,
etc.) I don’t think Girls is the greatest show ever invented or the worst thing to happen to television. However, it’s a pretty inventive, if flawed,
series, and I think it’s ultimately worthwhile.
Andrew
Rannells
– Yeah. This is just our first glimpse
of Elijah, and already, he’s a fun, engaging character who adds a lot to the
show.
Warnings
Sexual
content, swearing, drinking/smoking, and strong thematic elements.
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