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" Girls is pretty obviously brilliant. In a time filled with a lot of wonderfully unlikely television shows, it is one of the most wonderful and most unlikely. It has that incredibly rare ability to make people want to talk about it \u2014 a marvelous gift. The new season, which starts on Sunday, is no different. The four screwed-over millenials resume their struggle against the forces of the war on youth, although Girls makes having seasons of television shows seem ridiculous. The only time the show ever feels false or disingenuous is when it has to begin or end, when it looks for an opening or a finale. There should be no seasons of Girls, just one show a week until they grow old and die. It&amp;#039;s about being in between, after all.  What is extraordinary about a show in which so little happens is how much controversy Girls causes. Lena Dunham has been famous for a little over a year now, and she has been continuously involved during that time in a series of weird dust-ups. They don&amp;#039;t make much sense, when you take them one by one. At the beginning there was the problem that she had too many white people on her show. I cannot recall that same accusation being made about The Sopranos or Breaking Bad or indeed any of the other hundreds upon hundreds of television shows with all white casts. (This problem has been embarrassingly &amp;quot;rectified&amp;quot; in the opening episodes of the second season by a hyper-awkward Donald Glover appearance.) The other &amp;quot;scandals&amp;quot; were all similarly thin. She made an ad for Obama \u2014 somehow this caused controversy. She sent a dumb tweet. Who didn&amp;#039;t? This season, Jezebel has attacked the show for having product placement. Did I fail to read the story where the government purchased HBO and converted it into a public service? Shame on you, sitcom, for trying to earn money!  When Esquire interviewed Dunham, shortly after she went supernova, she claimed that she was a target simply for being a young woman with power. She&amp;#039;s right, of course. People need to make up stories about famous young women. Megan Fox walked through a hotel lobby and didn&amp;#039;t notice a kid, and this was the result. In themselves, the scandals, though stupid, aren&amp;#039;t particularly strange, but what is strange is the ferocity of Dunham&amp;#039;s defenders. People who do not ordinarily defend sitcom stars who fail to have diverse casts stood up for her, ferociously. People who do not ordinarily defend sitcom stars who hire vastly nepotistic casts stood up for her, ferociously. And now that the usual criticism has emerged before the second season, the critics of her critics have not hesitated to call them all insane.  Megan Fox, of course, had no defenders. I cannot imagine, if Gwyneth Paltrow had an all-white show with actresses whose daddies were all famous, that she would find an army of people willing to take her point of view. If Amy Adams wrote that she was going out for Halloween as Karla Homolka, would she find random online citizens attacking her attackers? No. Only Lena Dunham has fans like that. Why? One thing that has become clear, a full year after Girls launched, is that a crisis for young women is approaching. There has been a lot of talk (The End of Men, &amp;quot;The Problem with Boys&amp;quot;, etc.) about the crisis young men are facing. But consumer capitalism and a lousy economy are also taking their toll on young women. Depression is rising to &amp;quot;catastrophic&amp;quot; levels, as are anxiety levels. Lena Dunham is truly post-feminist insofar as she&amp;#039;s willing to acknowledge this reality, unafraid to show her characters&amp;#039; total lack of confidence, and to present women as outright failures. There have been struggling women on television before, but they have to be powerful. Tina Fey on 30 Rock can be as scattered as she likes: She has the best job in New York City, and she screws Matt Damon, and then, right after, a guy who&amp;#039;s somehow better-looking than Matt Damon. The manic magical pixie chicks, like Zooey Deschanel, are poor and have no real control of their lives, living moment to moment, but the key to these characters is that they all nonetheless radiate pure confidence, as if, by merely willing it, nothing could possibly go wrong in their lives.  The girls in Girls belong in neither of these categories. Their narcissism is brutally anxiety-provoking. They simply never, ever relax. I don&amp;#039;t know how they live, to be honest. Early in the upcoming season (reasonably significant spoiler), Hannah decides to do cocaine to write about it for a Web site that will pay her two hundred bucks for the story. It&amp;#039;s the perfect Hanna-plot. Even a coke binge is careerist and stressful and poorly thought through. Unless you can expense cocaine \u2014 something editors, in my experience, are notoriously reluctant to do \u2014 the economy of snorting the stuff to make money writing about it is not particularly efficient. Many have tried, let me assure you.  Anxiety-riddled insecure girls are a massive chunk of the population, and they are not merely underrepresented in culture; they are unrepresented except for this show. That&amp;#039;s why Dunham inspires such intense loyalty, I believe. She possesses a monopoly, which is why she can do no wrong, even when she does wrong, because the recognition that the group she is representing craves can be found literally nowhere else. Her loneliness makes her success somewhat frightening. It&amp;#039;s a sign of cultural and social failure that only Lena Dunham paints this reality.  And it&amp;#039;s not like this reality has never been captured before. The intense privacy of Girls reminded me the first time I saw it of Julia from Evelyn Waugh&amp;#039;s Brideshead Revisited, an aristocratic girl lost in a great city, much like Hannah and her friends: She lived apart in a little world, within a little world, the innermost of a system of concentric spheres, like the ivory balls laboriously carved in ancient China; a little problem troubling her mind \u2014 little, as she saw it, in abstract terms and symbols... Thus strategists hesitate over the map, the few pins and lines of coloured chalk, contemplating a change in the pins and lines, a matter of inches, which outside the room, out of sight of the studious officers, may engulf past, present and future in ruin or life. She was a symbol to herself then, lacking the life of both child and woman; victory and defeat were changes of pin and line; she knew nothing of war. Girls is a comedy without substantial laughs. It is a drama without real drama. It&amp;#039;s about the craving for the action while lacking almost any action. (Even getting hit by a truck doesn&amp;#039;t seem to change much.) It&amp;#039;s just people and more people, coming and going, appearing with all their promise and then disappearing, unfulfilled. Much has been made of Lena Dunham&amp;#039;s displayed naked body, but all the criticism or praise for the realism of her flesh misses the larger point. That&amp;#039;s what a body looks like in the mirror. We have become utterly inured to tittillation. Recognition shocks us.  The vast sum of money Dunham received for her book is entirely appropriate because there are millions of women who will have to own it. They are not more likely to buy it, but virtually required to. Because they will find in that book a reality which they can find nowhere else. Only Dunham has that substance. Therefore, her followers cannot abide any threat whatsoever to the source. They have enough anxiety. They cannot tolerate being anxious about the only show that knows it.  Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a17956/girls-season-2-review-14966489/?src=rss>