Tuesday, July 31, 2018

The Book of Rannells: Girls: Season 2, Episode 1 – “It’s About Time” (2013)


If I follow air dates on IMDb, season 2 of Girls should technically come later, after The New Normal – while the The New Normal premiered in the fall of 2012, Girls’s second season didn’t start airing until 2013.  That’s the easiest way to order my Andrew Rannells reviews, but in this instance, I’ll make an exception because I know Rannells filmed these before The New Normal.  If you look at his episodes on Girls around this time – the start of season 2 followed by the last half of season 3 – the New-Normal-shaped gap in the middle is pretty noticeable.  So, off we go with more Girls!

(Note:  in these reviews, I try to avoid spoilers as much as possible, but as I go through all six seasons of Girls, it’s not going to be feasible to talk about the episodes while simultaneously talking around the various relationship shake-ups.  So, take this as your official warning.  Who’s dating who will be considered fair game in these reviews, so while I won’t necessarily lead with “OMG, X & Y broke up!!!”, parts of those plots will be evident in my write-ups.)

Season 2 opens with establishing the new status quo.  Hannah has a new squeeze that she’s deliberately keeping at arm’s length to avoid another Adam situation, but she’s not exactly keeping Adam at arm’s length – he’s laid up in his apartment with a broken leg, and Hannah has been looking after him.  After Marnie moved out of Hannah’s apartment last season, Elijah moved in, and he and Hannah thoroughly enjoy the honeymoon phase of their new roomies/besties relationship as they prepare to throw their first party together.  If you’ve been paying attention, you know that parties on Girls are prime places for drama, and all kinds of relationship craziness goes down.

A solid season opener, in my opinion.  The Hannah/Adam stuff is messed up, as it always is, and I feel for Hannah trying to assert some distance even as she feels stuck.  Unfortunately, it does minimize time with Sandy, the new guy Hannah’s seeing, played by none other than Donald Glover!  Before I started watching Girls, I’d heard that Glover had been a guest star and was excited when I saw him, but this episode definitely under-uses him.

For other developments, I’m officially all about Shoshanna, and her being hilarious and endearingly odd is the main reason I’m coming around to Ray, who entered the friend group as a buddy of Charlie, Marnie’s ex, but who now maintains his connection to the circle largely through the little thing he and Shoshanna have going on.  I love the scene of Shoshanna angrily searching through a stack of purses for her own while Ray awkwardly tries to talk about his feelings.

But for real, Elijah is just awesome here.  I like everything about his weirdly-compatible friendship with Hannah.  Whether they’re spooning in bed (“I’m sorry I have a boner – it’s not for you”) or discussing potential themes for future parties (Elijah’s argument in favor of a French salon night:  “I was watching Midnight in Paris, and I thought, I could do that,”) they’re just a blast together, and I find that I almost always enjoy Hannah best when she has Elijah to bounce off of.

We also get a little more of Elijah outside of Hannah, which is good – it helps keep him from simply being her gay BFF.  He’s anxious to bring George, his older rich boyfriend, to the party to meet his friends, but when George gets drunk and embarrasses Elijah, it results in a bit of a meltdown for Elijah.  I really love when, later on, he admits to Marnie that he’s not sure if he could leave George because George pays for everything, that he didn’t mean for it to happen but now he doesn’t know what to do.  I feel like the idea of a “kept woman/man” is often framed as someone who seeks out a rich partner for the perks, or maybe someone with no ambitions of their own just latching themselves onto a wealthy meal ticket.  Not that I think Elijah is particularly ambitious, but he didn’t set out to get himself a sugar daddy, and I like seeing how unsure he feels about it.  This leads into other uncertainty/ill-advised actions on his behalf, the latter of which are inevitably going to come back to bite him.

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