TV: Boys who like 'Girls' to be Girls Who Like Boys

Season 3 of 'Girls' premiered this week and I still don't know what to make of it. We always knew this show would be a navel-gazing, fake-problems stacked, eye-roll inducing twentysomething smorgasbord, but there were always truth kernels, clever dialogue and a few genuinely touching moments in Seasons 1 and 2.

Where did the problems start? What have the symptoms been?

I particularly liked the dark turn Season 2 took, but found Hannah's instant OCD affliction a bit phony. We're just hearing about this now?? In Episode 19 of the show? The new season starts out with this cutesy, gross shot of Hannah swallowing her "OCD control pill" and boyfriend Adam making her open her mouth and stick out her tongue to make sure she took the pill. Coz, you know, most OCD sufferers would want to fake taking the pill so it wouldn't be under control and their lives can spiral out of control. Point being: pill taken; sitcom control over debilitating disease: done. May we never speak of it again.

Only in the world of fairytale NYC, can three twentysomething New Yorkers take multiple days off from their 'jobs'(?) to take a long and winding road trip upstate to pick up a friend. Although Jessa was the naughty, real-talk spark of the first two seasons, her stint at rehab seems phoned in. Her role as the snarky, bored-with-it-all, jaded princess of group therapy is a cliche. A pissed-off therapy member throwing a drink in her face is a wonderful wake-up call to Jessa's character and the show. Can we throw a pitcher of Kool-Aid in Lena Dunham's face to wake her up?

Apparently Hannah is writing a book about....something? Life? Coffee shops? Ill-advised, shapeless haircuts (if you're gonna go for the pixie cut, go REAL pixie.) She's veering dangerously close into 'The Real World: London' Jay's territory and his obsession with "My play! My play!" Her book! Her book!

We're only on Episode 3 next week, so there is plenty of time to turn this ship around and make things a bit more real and less...Freshman year on a bad day.

To quote Belle & Sebastian: "You wrote a book about yourself/The people left it on the shelf/Write another one/Now you've got a story that's worth talking about."