As if things weren’t bad enough.
We can’t go to the movies, a Broadway show or a bookstore to find entertainment while the city is in coronavirus lockdown, but we can always turn to . . . Lena Dunham?
Reader, she’s back. The creator of “Girls” — who turned a brief window of fascination with her from middle-aged male TV executives and their counterparts in the publishing industry into a lucrative career as “a voice of a generation” — has decided to lift our collective spirits by collaborating with Vogue magazine on a serialized romance novel called “Verified Strangers.”
C’mon, really?
“Girls” was a trendy and ultimately depressing show about a group of young, entitled people who were supposed to be from a land called Williamsburg and who used each other mercilessly. Some uplift. None of the young people who actually lived in Williamsburg actually watched the show, but “Girls” was the version of the hipster enclave that Hollywood was willing to accept and market as the real thing. Dunham wrote “Not That Kind of Girl,” a best-selling memoir, and launched a newsletter, but after a period of saturation, in which she became a quote-machine on topics unrelated to her TV show, people tired of her. After “Girls” went off the air, some HBO executives privately admitted that enough was enough. A second series on the network, “Camping,” failed to find an audience in 2018.
Without a TV platform, Dunham was adrift, and other voices filled the void — in particular Phoebe Waller-Bridge, whose one-two punch of “Killing Eve” and “Fleabag” made Dunham look like a footnote. Dunham attempted to score some hipster cred by appearing as one of the Spahn Ranch girls in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in . . . Hollywood,” but no one noticed. And now the crumbling empire of Condé Nast has decided to link its fortunes with her, calling her one of the “most gifted writers” we have. Truly. And Candace Bushnell is Margaret Atwood.
For her part, Dunham is gushing about being “fascinated” by serialized publishing, taking note, OMG, that none other than Charles Dickens originally published his classic novels in serial format. Watch out, “David Copperfield”! Move over, “Martin Chuzzlewit”! Here comes Dunham with “Verified Strangers,” her story of a 32-year-old who finds the dating scene in LA heartbreaking — could it be that all the men are gazing at themselves in the mirror? —and turns to her friends for help. Does that not sound much like “Girls,” but set in another city?
Were Vogue’s editors more in touch with what’s happening in culture, maybe they would have reached out to Sally Rooney, the young Irish novelist whose international best seller “Normal People” will soon be a series on Hulu, for a collaboration that would better address the magazine’s target audience.
Dunham is old hat. But then maybe Vogue is, too.