Lena Dunham's 'Girls': Where Are the Black Friends?
Boston Globe columnist Francie Latour has a bone to pick with Lena Dunham, creator of HBO's new series Girls. She says that despite having had the perseverance to incorporate female characters who don't reflect Hollywood's beauty ideal, Dunham, when asked about the lack of color on her show, responds as if she's not the show's creator, writer and director.
Much of Girls is actually set in Brooklyn, a borough where just one-third of the population is white. Yet as Dunham's character, 24-year-old unemployed writer Hannah Horvath, and her friends fumble through life with cutting wit and low self-esteem, they do it in a virtually all-white bubble.
That brings me to the thing that bothers me even more about Dunham: Earlier this week, when the question of the show's lack of diversity and "white-girl-problems" focus was put to her directly, this bold visionary now running her own HBO show suddenly lost all her agency. The fearless and fearlessly honest auteur blazing a new trail in television could barely bring herself to own her own series.
"When I get a tweet from a girl who's like, 'I'd love to watch the show, but I wish there were more women of color,' " Dunham told the Huffington Post, "You know what? I do, too, and if we have the opportunity to do a second season, I'll address that."
In other words: Who, me? This isn't actually my show! I'm just the intern who gets coffee for the guy who's really making all the calls, Judd Apatow!
Read Francie Latour's entire column at the Boston Globe.
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