Via: Tuned In
SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, stop cashing in on your sexuality and watch last night’s episode of Girls. “Oh, I’ve got a fixed-gear bike and I’m gonna date a black guy!” After the first episode of Girls season 2 aired, I saw some comments about the “tokenism” of casting Donald Glover as Sandy, Hannah’s new boyfriend. I didn’t want to say anything about it at the time, because I didn’t want to spill what I knew from seeing the second episode, “I Get Ideas”: that Sandy wasn’t being used as a token exactly but–as bad or maybe worse, at least from a creative standpoint–as metacommentary. You probably know Glover from Community, which itself is one of the most meta comedies on TV. But what Girls did with his character was a far more sustained and jarring meta statement than anything Community has done: writing in a character for (seemingly) the purpose of addressing the criticism that the show had no major characters of color. About that controversy: I believe it would be plausible to have the cast of a show set in Brooklyn, a very diverse borough, include a lot of people of color. I believe it is also (unfortunately) plausible to say that the social circles of these particular four privileged white recent Oberlin graduates do not include any people of color. But what’s not so plausible? Positing that Hannah’s social circle is racially and culturally homogenous–except that she ends up meeting and dating what might very well be the first black Republican to step foot in Williamsburg since the Reconstruction era. Meta isn’t automatically bad: I could see this kind of device working in, say, 30 Rock, which regularly writes in storylines to address controversies in TV or involving the show itself. (Say, when it gave Tracy Jordan a story to parallel Tracy Morgan’s offensive comments about gays in real life.) In Girls, a very different, naturalistic show, the story felt like a sketch shoehorned in to say: we hear you, we get it, we’re thinking about
Read full story at: Tuned In
Posted: January 21st, 2013
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