With its fourth season, Girls seems to have hit something of a wall. The characters were always tittering on the edge of being downright detestable, of course, but now - after spending more than 40 episodes with them - they're near on insufferable in their self-destructiveness. Girls set out to sum up a generation, but now it already seems dated - it doesn't feel realistic, revelatory or candid in the same way it did in its first season. That's not to say Girls makes for entirely terrible TV in its fourth season: if you can put up with watching the characters in the same way you'd watch a train crash playing out (over and over again), then there's a relative amount of enjoyment to be had. But Girls also feels like it's taken these characters as far as they can go - there's a clinging sense of repetitiveness inherent to the latest season that wasn't present in those that preceded it. Instead of running the show into the ground until it's plainly unbearable to sit through, Lena Dunham should call it quits and move onto something else; an essential move if Girls is to be remembered as a worthwhile show that had a lot to say about twentysomethings today.
Sam Hill is an ardent cinephile and has been writing about film professionally since 2008. He harbours a particular fondness for western and sci-fi movies.
