We – and by we I mean women addicted to television about women – were all a little desperate for a show that replaced the void in our hearts and DVR spaces that the show ‘Sex and The City” created. Our generation needed a well written series that perfectly described the confusing space burgeoning adulthood brings. It’s not a reality that can be clouded by too many cosmopolitans, and New York City is not as fabulous as it used to be.

‘Girls’ refuses to sugar coat anything and isn’t afraid to highlight the ambiguity of growing old in a city as brutally honest as New York. The show was harassed with constant comparisons to Sex and the City, which I didn’t understand given that the show worked hard to stray away from the sentiments of HBO’s coveted series.

While I still watch Sex and the City faithfully in any spare moment of time that I have, there is something to be said about how relatable Lena Dunham’s character ‘Hannah’ and her circle of ever evolving friends are. In Sex and the City you had Carrie Bradshaw, Samantha Jones, Charlotte York and Miranda Hobbs: four women with extreme differences in personalities, income and lifestyles. Carrie, the main character whose column is eponymous with the name of the series, lives in a rent-controlled studio on the west side of Manhattan on a freelance journalist salary. Samantha, a successful public relations executive, finds time in her seemingly never busy schedule to have sex daily and go out with the girls every night to the most exclusive clubs. I never knew that women in their mid-30’s were as active in the nightclub scene as these women, but for the sake of entertainment and structuring the fantasy of the elusive New York, it worked. Not only was Carrie’s living situation questionable, despite the memorable episode of her realizing that the value of the shoes she had could equal a down payment on a home, but the overall premise of their lives was that of a fairytale.

I firmly stand by the point that Mr. Big is not real. Yes, it is worth applauding that after 10 years of treating Carrie horribly he finally made an honest woman out of her (despite having already left her at the altar), but the fairy tale strays far from reality. We all hope that our significant others that tell us through their actions daily that a commitment is something they are not ready for, eventually have the epiphany that you are the one. But the truth shows that in the case of Mr. Bigs all across the country, they never reach that epiphany, especially if they have far surpassed their 40’s and are with women who do not give them a reason to. Call me cynical, but the show in general gave us girls a lot of false hope about the city and about any other aspect of their lives that we thought resembled ours but truly didn’t. We thought of it less as entertainment and more as ourselves in these characters. It was never intended to represent women honestly but that was the responsibility it held as more women became invested in the lives of these fictional characters that they desperately wanted to be.

‘Girls’ is the complete antithesis of what Sex and the City represents – which is the sole reason why I am infatuated with the series. Dunham’s writing is witty but not pretentious or condescending. She doesn’t insult the audience by bedazzling the truth; she lets the raw, unfiltered elements of a young woman’s life ring free. From her complicated relationship with the odd yet endearing Adam, to her less than ideal friendships with Marnie, Jessa and Shoshanna, every area of this show seeks to emulate what are lives are like: unpredictable, unexplainable yet it still manages to make sense. I know more ‘Adams’ then I do ‘Mr. Bigs’ because not everything is as cut and dry; people are not meant to be easily defined or explained. The natural progression of each character in ‘Girls’ is just how we all progress as people – the most together friend of us may lose her job and her perfect boyfriend and have trouble picking up the pieces, just like Marnie. Jessa, a Samantha with a conscious, marries a man she thought she hated after only knowing him for a day; it turns out to be the best relationship she’s ever been in and the enlightenment she’s gotten from that relationship have reformed her frivolous and free spirited ways.  Shoshanna, who has recently been deflowered, is the only one of the four friends who is new and very inexperienced to the dating world yet small bouts of wisdom and innocence make her character the funniest of the group. In all of their awkwardness and naïve choices I can relate to these ‘Girls’ because I feel like they are not the perfect or even the ideal New Yorkers and they have no desire to be. They do not give into the overdone rhetoric and stereotypes of what it means to be a New Yorker; the emphasis is on who they are as young people still figuring it all out which is a universal dilemma regardless of the region.

Further more, the most frustrating critique of the show was that the show did not feature enough Black people in it. Not every show is meant to be an agent of change, and ‘Girls’ is one of those. The purpose of this series was for Lena to express her reality, and if her reality is not having a diverse group of friends than that is what she should showcase. Attacking this show for lack of diversity is equivalent to attacking rap artist Waka Flocka for not having engaging or intelligent lyrics in his music. That was never the intention, and if that is what you want then you should find a different show or artist to listen to. ‘Girls’ is the ‘Sex and the City’ of our generation, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.