This season covers Hannah securing a new job and seeking to have Adam meet up with her social standards. Marnie starts to have sex with Ray on multiple occasions and Shoshanna needs 3 credits to graduate. Jenna is secretly going through rehabilitation and chooses her new boss over her friends.
It's not Rainbow Brite and ponies, but it's as if Dunham hit her creative reset button, fixed her hair, and started looking at how these characters would begin to mature - with the exception of Shoshanna, who remains a chatty accessory to it all.
In the first few episodes of this season, Girls does a much better job of finding the balance between humor and drama that has eluded it in previous seasons.
There's... a chance that Girls, like Hannah, has found its voice and that it doesn't speak for "a generation" or anything quite so presumptuous, that it merely speaks for itself. Still, I hope it's still occasionally plucky enough to try.
Girls has come a long way: It's the sharpest show out there about the self-justifications of the self-obsessed and the immense power even of decaying friendships. That's the price Girls paid for beating the haters at their own game: It learned to hate.
Like Hannah herself, it no longer feels like it's trying quite so hard to experience edgy things just for the sake of material, so that both its shocks and its missteps come across as earned.
