Give or take Caitlin Moran, Lena Dunham has pretty much cornered the market in distinctive, strong female voices that make you both laugh your head off and think long and hard about the whacked-out state of the world. While Moran's recent Channel 4 sitcom one-off Raised By Wolves about life on a West Midlands estate went pretty directly for the funny bone, Dunham's series is more nuanced and has a lot more shadier edges. And being set in New York rather than the Black Country it obviously looks better too. But despite not being an out-and-out sitcom it is just as likely to make you smile.
The third series of Girls finds the characters different and yet still struggling to grow up and get to grips with adult life in all its contradictory complexity. Marnie (Alison Williams) has split with her boyfriend and moved back in with her mum, Soshanna (Zosia Mamet) is still with cafe guy Ray, Hannah (Dunham) is more settled with Adam and getting excited about having some work published on – yay – a website, and Jessa (Jemima Kirke) is – about time too – in rehab.
It is Jessa's rehab situation that dominates the early part of the new series, particularly when it turns out that Richard E Grant is one of her fellow inmates. Grant seems to be channelling a little bit of Withnail and I here, it's as if his character in the cult movie had actually made it in Hollywood, cleaned up his act and got more louche than ever before falling off the wagon. It is also fun to spot uber-hipster Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth as a fellow patient. The group therapy sessions and Jessa's abuse of the other patients provide some quality laughs.
Hannah, of course, also gets a fair amount of screen-time. Her relationship with Adam seems to be working surprisingly well. They appear to be living together and he even agrees to her having friends round for dinner and making conversation with them at the table – very out of character. As is the moment when Marnie, usually the epitome of beauty queen elegance, lets a taco tumble out of her mouth. The other big change for Hannah, by the way, is her strikingly shorter haircut, which is a bit of an elephant in the room, not acknowledged until she comes out with a fantastic line about it in a heated moment.
The first episode is a pretty slow scene-setter, but the action ramps up nicely in the second episode when Hannah, Adam and Shoshanna hire a car and head out to visit Jessa. It's a classic filmic road trip journey with all the cliches that entails, which Dunham, as the main writer of the show, is clearly acutely aware of, saying at one point: "It's just so similar to other road trips I've seen in various media. It's like a Don Henley song." They stop at roadside cafes, jiggle along to music, buy vintage furniture and bicker. Not particualrly original - and they know it – but still lots of fun.
It feels as if there is a lot of pressure on Vogue's latest cover star to deliver at the moment. The second series of Girls seemed to suffer from second album syndrome – it was frequently too dark and too depressing, as if Dunham was reflecting on the downside of becoming a bona fide phenomenon – portraying the world as a scary place which was hard to deal with even if you were as privileged as this bunch frankly are. The third series started off in a similar mood, but the second episode has a much lighter side to it and bodes well for the rest of the series. Oh, and by the way, in case you hadn't noticed, I'm male and I loved it. It might be called Girls, but I think boys should definitely watch it too. They might learn something as well as laugh.
Girls is on Sky Atlantic on Mondays at 10pm.
