From Sex and the City to Girls: Defining Women on Television

The portrayal of women in television has significantly evolved throughout time — a reflection of the socio-dynamic developments that occurred simultaneously. The increased development of female characters in television led to an array of reinterpreted genres, including the female-driven comedy. Two popular shows that fall under this genre include Sex and the City (1997) and Girls (2011) — both following the lives of female-protagonists who are inadvertently defining what it means to be a woman in their respective generation. Yet, despite belonging to the same genre, both shows create vastly different presentations of the female perspective — Sex and the City being a more glossed-up depiction of the upwardly mobile life when compared to Girls’ naturalistic, detailed depiction of behavior. Thus, the evolution of Sex and the City to Girls can be seen as a result of the change in purpose, used to illustrate the narrative. Girls evolved the female-driven comedy by using unfiltered reality as a template (rather than the glamor-fueled voyeurism of Sex and the City) in developing character, plot, and tone — defying previous genre conventions in order to capture an honest depiction of woman in modern-day society.

Girls constructs its characters through their flaws, countering the aspirational nature of the protagonists in Sex and the City. The leads of Sex and the City (Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha) all have stable careers, live a lavish lifestyle, and are attempting to find true love (in the long-run). Each main character is a reflection of an archetype — Carrie being the idealist fashionista, Miranda being a Type-A career woman, Charlotte being a romantic conservative, and Samantha being a hardworking, sexually-liberated hedonist. Yet, despite the variety of qualities, the woman’s adventures tend to depend on their pursuit of men — as Miranda points out ironically in one episode, “How does it happen that four such smart women have nothing to talk about but boyfriends?” As author Imelda Whelehan puts it, "They do exist in this kind of vacuum,” further elaborating that “the chaotic element in their lives is their partners. Everything else is ultimately fine, mainly because they have the money to fix most problems." Not only are men made the MacGuffin of the narrative, but all other elements of these women’s lives are, in turn, glossed over. Each woman on the show is successful and externally beautiful (in accordance to the standards of television), but they lack an intimate realism to their internal issues (instead pertaining to the sitcom-set boundaries of emotion), allowing the characters to be aspiring yet not truly relatable.

This is contrasted in Girls through Dunham’s dependence on highlighting the intimate realism of the character’s internal issues. As a result, the protagonists of Girls (Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, Shoshanna) reflect real, fully-dimensional people who experience relatable, and deeply personal struggles and triumphs in life. Hannah Horvath is a struggling writer, attempting to make a life for herself in a post-recession era. She’s humorous, immature, selfish, and witty — traits that all stem from her own insecurities about her appearance (being slightly overweight) and her direction in life (being unemployed), saying at one point, “Any mean thing someone's gonna say about me, I've already said to me, about me, probably in the last half hour.” Hannah’s character constantly varies in terms of likability — sometimes being loyal to her friends, yet other times completely abandoning them in favor of her own personal pursuits. Hannah’s insecurities, figure and dislikability represents a departure in representation of sexually-active women. She lacks the refined, glossed-over look that had been popularized in shows such as Sex and the City, using the body as art rather than erotica. That quality not only correlates more to the female perspective, but acts as a reclamation of what it is to be a sexually-active woman (almost countering the opening credits of Sex and the City where Carrie Bradshaw lies seductively on a bus poster in lingerie with the phrase “Carrie knows sex.”) Marnie, Jessa, and Zoe all add to this naturalistic outlook of human behavior — Marnie is domineering, self-centered, and caring; Jessa is bohemian, unpredictable, and brash; and lastly Shoshanna is naive, innocent, and superficial. Each character constantly verges on the line between appealing and unappealing — clear that they are more determined to be real women rather than a projection of what they could be (or what society believes they should be). As journalist Alyce Adams puts it, “Sex and the City is what we wish we were. Girls is what we are.” By using unfiltered realism as a template for character development, Girls manages to avoid the boundaries that Sex and the City set for itself. Instead, portraying fully-fleshed out characters that behave and interact as regular people do — without the intention of being constantly liked.

By avoiding the use of archetypes in favor of realistic characters, Girls allows itself to tackle topics that are relatable through the lack of TV-necessitated appeal. The narrative structure of Sex and the City reflects its stylized depiction of life — simplified and secure. Most episodes end with their respective storylines wrapped up and a sense of uplift, while each character getting an almost equal amount of screen time and amount of development. One example would be an episode dealing with Carrie’s financial burdens, something that is solved at the end through the help of her friend Charlotte. Yet the show does little to follow through with the plot line in following episodes, with Carrie reverting back to her lavish lifestyle almost immediately. Much of the issues these women face end with a punchline — lacking severity or depth to the character. Topics that are covered throughout the show include “Dating Men in their 20s” and “Dealing with Modelizers (men who exclusively date models)” — using the pursuit of men as the catalyst for much of the narrative. While the show does highlight relevant issues, such as illness, infertility, bereavement, aging, single motherhood, sexual discrimination and divorce, it only provides a glossed-up version, replacing the emotional aspects of these situations with witty comments and punch-lines. As Kim Akass, author of Reading Sex and the City, explains, “the women are still caught in fairytale narratives.” As a result, the show fails to add any novel answers in the tension between independence and the desire for sex, love and partnership — something that is a “function of the fact that it is, after all, just a TV fairy story” according to journalist Alice Wignall. The plot of Sex and the City is thus restrained by its stylized depiction of life — something that Girls manages to avoid more significantly.

Girls refrained from using a consistent structure. Episodes vary widely not only in content but also in characters used — a reflection of the “slice-of-life” system of narration. Although Hannah can be seen as the main protagonist, the regularity of characters throughout each season vary according to their need. While some episodes focus on one character (“bottle episodes” such as the episode Hannah spends a weekend with a Doctor), others attempt to incorporate the entire cast — each one treading through their own respective storyline that may or may not have to do with anything else in the episode. The plot weaves a realistic friendship in this sense — in which time is of value (rarely are all of the girls together in the show) and people’s lives don’t automatically interconnect.

Issues faced by the characters vary in both short-term and long-term impact, yet they are always connected to an emotional root (insecurity and uncertainty). Hannah’s struggles with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder are unfiltered, highlighting the frustrating and abnormal nature of the disorder with Hannah exhibiting symptoms of looping (in which she sees everything, including “murderous things” on a loop) and at one point even rupturing her eardrum while attempting to clean it with a cotton swab. The show refrains from glorifying the topics it deals with, highlighting the internal struggles people face when they have problems rather than just issuing a neat solution to them. Because of this dependency on character struggle rather than narrative structure, Girls can often feel unfocused as in terms of plot — yet its that lack of focus that makes it so startlingly real and relatable. Thus, by dismantling the episodic nature in favor of using a more cohesive and continuous “slice(s)-of-life” method, Girls manages to illustrate the modern-day perils and frustrations of women without attempting to beautify it. They don’t necessarily always solve their problems, but that doesn’t stop them from showing their problems. Girls prefers to capture all of the raw intimate moments with a tint of awkwardness and uncertainty — just as they tend to be in life. Both the characters and plot are intertwined with the anti-cinematic quality of reality through tone — the final divergence between Sex and the City and Girls.

Girl’s evolved interpretation of what it means to be a woman is driven by a reflective, behaviorist tone — aiding in the show’s attempt to grasp the bittersweet bleakness of reality. Sex and the City’s tone was also motivated by its approach to female-driven comedies — capturing a light, glamorous portrayal of the working woman in New York City. Television critic Emily Nussbaum defines the show as “a bold riff on the romantic comedy: the show wrestled with the limits of that pink-tinted genre for almost its entire run. In the end, it gave in.” The show was an extension of romantic comedies, yet choosing the successful woman as the voyeur — modernizing Haley Gurley Brown’s model of a women into something more independent, while still pertaining to certain expectations of femininity. The show used light, warm colors, and non-diegetic jazz music to create a romantic depiction of the upwardly-mobile New York City — combining the lens of films such as Sleepless in Seattle and Breakfast at Tiffany’s to create a city that suits the characters’ (somewhat superficial) needs. Sex and the City’s tone is therefore more identifiable with a genre, rather than an accurate representation of a gender in a generation.

Girls took a more abstract approach to genre tones, choosing to subvert conventions by constantly blurring the line between comedy and drama. As a result, the show paints a more accurate depiction of reality — a grittier, rawer portrayal that can be almost uncomfortable to watch at times. Girls refrains from glorifying the harsher nature of the New York they live in, choosing a realistic environment over Sex and The City’s glossier depiction. Tim Ives, a cinematographer of the show, attributes the style as “help[ing] bridge that gap between stupid television and something that seems real.” The show uses wide shots and natural lighting as much as possible, creating an environment that essentially feels flat — almost a metaphor for the protagonists own low-rent existence. This can also be seen as a reflection of the generation in which it takes place (2010s). As Sex and the City’s Kim Catrall explains, “[Girls] It’s not as fantastical. But we live in different times. [The recession of] 2008 was a real big game-changer for everybody, and I look at that show, and it represents what young women today are dealing with.” The films tackles issues that were repercussions of real-life events, using the socio-economic environment to further add another layer of struggle to the characters. The use of society’s issues to breed the stories of the characters is similar in nature to Julie D’acci’s theory that “the way gender is imagined and represented in the mind's eye of the television industry, has everything to do with the historical distribution of jobs, money, and power — with the functioning of the industry as an economic and social sector.” The pilot opens with Hannah’s parents cutting her off, and then her struggle to find a decent-paying job in which she feels fulfilled. Sets like Adam’s apartment highlight the messy, urbanized, rusted tone of everything in society — clashing with the uptight, open, neat apartments of Sex and the City. The show presents the environment as more clustered, and unpolished — the apartments barely containing any space themselves. Together, this captures the somber tone of the post-recession generation — opposing the more fantastical, glamorized world of Sex and the City in favor of illustrating the harsh realities of our world and the struggles that stem from them. The women of this world feel more relatable, not only because much of their struggle is experienced in reality, but because the tone attempts to accurately capture their behavior and environment as woman rather than reflect a more glamorized ideal.

Thus, although Sex and the City and Girls contain many surface similarities, their differences lie in their objectives for portrayal. Both are female-driven comedies, but attempt to evoke different emotions through the templates they use to capture the perception of woman. By using reality as its template in forming character, plot, and tone — Girls managed to cultivate a more honest depiction of women in modern-day society than what compared to its genre counterparts.

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