Thursday, June 21, 2018

The Book of Rannells: Girls: Season 1, Episode 3 – “All Adventurous Women Do” (2012)


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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