Image Credit: Jojo Whilden/HBO

There is no joy in Girls-ville. It’s a testament to how well Girls, the new HBO creation by writer-director-star Lena Dunham that premiered Sunday night, is constructed and paced that the overwhelming joylessness that could easily have engulfed this enterprise was mostly avoided in its premiere episode. Dunham was wise to commence her first episode with a scene that placed her sad-sack central character Hannah with parents played by Peter Scolari and Becky Ann Baker. These two pros brought an energy to the crucial set-up of the show — that these people who brought Hannah into the world, who’ve paid for every morsel of food and every morsel of education she’s taken in, have decided, two years after her college graduation, that the buck stops here. (Scolari has long lived in the shadow of the out-sized success of his erstwhile Bosom Buddy Tom Hanks but he’s remained a fine laser-focused comic actor, while Baker has had too few opportunities to display her brand of tough maternal affection since her brilliant work on the brilliant Freaks and Geeks.) READ FULL STORY »