The fourth season of Lena Dunham's Girls (Showcase, Mondays, 7.30pm) could be dubbed The One Where Hannah Goes to Iowa. Dunham's flawed protagonist, an aspiring writer, has moved to the Midwest to join a prestigious post-graduate writing program. There are birds and trees and grass and large, light-filled apartments available for rent at bargain prices. It's a long way from New York in oh so many ways.
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The new season of Dunham's comedy sees many of its characters making fresh starts. As Hannah (played by Dunham) erratically adjusts to a life with time for baking brownies but without her boyfriend, Adam (Adam Driver), Soshanna (Zosia Mamet) has graduated from college and is looking for a job. Marnie (Allison Williams) is focused on pursuing a music career and becoming more than a mistress to her musical partner, Desi (Ebon Moss-Bachrach). Jessa (Jemima Kirke) continues to be her customary bolshie self while attending AA meetings and remaining the character that the series' creator, writer, executive producer and sometime director Dunham could do more with.
However, as the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. These are still very much the girls of the title: self-absorbed, selfish and struggling to make their way, often without much grace or sensitivity. They kid themselves that they're being grownup when they speak their minds, but they come across more like sulky children, careless with each other and with others.
When she appeared early last year on The Graham Norton Show, Dunham memorably described her central quartet as young women who weren't quite as nice as they thought they were. That ambivalent approach to her characters has long been evident in Dunham's consistently intriguing creation. Girls is a show enlivened by encounters that charm and alarm and it thrives on depicting the awkward, uneasy moments between people. From the get-go, it earned a reputation for audacity, blistering emotional honesty and a capacity to surprise, even to shock. Dunham is clearly making the most of that reputation – and the looser constraints of her cable-TV home base – notably with a graphic, boundary-breaking sex scene between Marnie and Desi right up front in the first episode of the new season. She loves to poke at conventions and it does her show no harm. In fact, the opposite is true: it's always interesting to see into what kind of mess she'll propel her characters into.
The gal pals are now older, but no wiser, and the fact that they're four seasons along and more familiar hasn't stopped them being interesting. Their creator is skilled at that great and necessary TV trick of making you want to see more.
Dunham's willingness to cast her characters in an unflattering light as they clumsily make their way through experiences with love, sex, friendship, work and relationships is a quality that her show shares with Broad City, which just started its second season (Comedy, Wednesdays, 8.30pm). Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson's comedy is about Ilana and Abbi, an energetic pair of 20-somethings in the city – New York, of course – who are also endeavouring to find their way with an abundance of pluck and resilience and a capacity to be blithely unabashed by even their most outrageous transgressions.
The shows invite comparison. They both present young women, friends in New York, negotiating a comparably challenging time in their lives. And what they reveal about this period in life is a pervasive sense of uncertainty and insecurity. The barely contained chaos is more striking in the madcap Broad City, where nothing seems out-of-bounds for Ilana and Abbi as they pursue their goals, whether it's scoring drugs or acquiring an air-conditioner during a heatwave. They are like mad musketeers, involved in their own nutty quests and they're surrounded by oddballs, of which the king of the pack is Abbi's sly and slothful flatmate, Matt (John Gemberling).
But while Abbi and Illana are locked into a firmly supportive union, Hannah's pals in Girls are less dependable. Though she's capable of surprising vulnerability and compassion, nobody would want to rely on Jessa for anything, and Marnie's efforts to get some feedback on a new song from Soshanna and Jessa provides yet another example of how frequently these friends disappoint each other.
What these admirable comedies share, beyond a focus on young women, is an acute, astute and unflinching eye for modern times. They're distinguished by disarming candour and a bracing rawness: there's nothing pretty here. They're full of the messiness of life and both make you care about their characters, despite their myriad flaws. You want to find out what will happen next, and, in both shows, it's gratifyingly difficult to predict.
So welcome back, girls. Can't wait to see what you'll get up to.