Girls Just Want to Have Fun, by Arthur Tebbel – Pop Art #175 | @MDWorld

April 10, 2012 Arthur Tebbel 6 Comments

Dear Art,

            I have a new show on HBO launching this weekend.  It has gathered an awful lot of good press and I’m really pleased about that but there’s been a fair amount of backlash.  I know that I’ve gotten a lot very fast in this industry but it’s not as if I’m the first out of nowhere star in the history of entertainment and I feel like this is out of proportion.  Is there anything I can do to curb this ugly sentiment?

            -Lena Dunham

 

Lena,

I’m going to try and get the ugly part of this out of the way real quick: a lot of this is probably because you’re a woman.  We could talk forever about how much of your success is owed to your famous mother but nepotism is a rich and celebrated tradition in Hollywood.  Seriously, have you seen how famous Will Smith’s kids are?  That’s way more egregious than the daughter of a famous photographer getting her first movie over publicized.

That isn’t to say I think all of your press has been completely fair.  A lot has been made of you being naked in this show.  I guess this is a big deal because not a lot of other writers/creators are baring all in their shows but female nudity on HBO could not be less rare.  I actually can’t think of an HBO show that doesn’t have naked women on it.  I get that you’re a little heavier than the brigade of rail-thin actresses and body doubles that usually do this sort of thing and I’m happy that you feel this comfortable with your body but I think the window for being pumped about nudity on pay cable has long closed.  I was going to say something about it being braver at this point to not have anyone be naked at all or have all-male nudity but the former is just every other TV show and the latter is probably not much of a statement at all.

 

So that paragraph of kvetching was way longer than my positive paragraph.  That’s really too bad.  I’m rooting for you.  The problem with the Internet is most of the people who spend too much time on it are of your generation and see you succeeding when they aren’t and want to hate on it.  This will happen forever to everyone as the human race slowly ages out all the pre-Internet human beings.  You can shut them up by making a really good show that people have no choice but to give props to.  HBO has a great track record (although they’ve been way more hit-or-miss the last five years than they were the decade before) and if they think you’ve got something you probably do.