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100Exasperating but fascinating.
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100The entire constellation of impetuous, ambitious, determined and insecure young urbanites in Girls is realigning in the new season, but at no point in the four episodes sent to critics for review do you feel that any of it is artificial.
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100Sharper, smarter, more richly layered, detailed (and acted), Girls has improved upon its first season.
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100Girls kicks off its second season even more assured of itself, able to deftly work strands of hard-earned drama into the free-flowing comedic moments of four postcollege girls trying to find their way in life.
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91Girls continues to delight and provoke in a way too few shows can.
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91There hasn't been a show since "The Sopranos" so concerned with bodily functions, and it makes its oft-compared predecessor "Sex and the City" look like a TeenNick production. But it's also fresh, bracing and original.
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91Girls above all is about uncomfortable creatures. That can be a helluva thing to watch at times. But still very see-worthy.
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91As bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as it was in its first season, Girls may now be even spunkier, funnier, and riskier. [11 Jan 2013, p.80]
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90It lets you simultaneously laugh at and with the characters, and feel justified for laughing, then ashamed, and then the pendulum swings back again; this is a much messier and more fascinating set of reactions than what sitcoms typically evoke.
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90The new season contains more laugh-out-loud funny moments, the characters are well defined and the male characters get more prominence.
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88Girls is still undergoing ultimately minor growing pains, but it's frequently poignant and audacious, and actors who made little impression in the first season are allowed to flower.
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80The hotly anticipated second season of Girls, which returns to HBO on Sunday, builds on the strengths of its stellar first season and captures the quicksilver magic of Dunham at her best, with the first four episodes supplying a mighty kick to the heart.
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80Girls has matured leaps and bounds, comedically and structurally, but it has jettisoned some of its ambiguity, its sweetness, its own affection for its characters. It's more coherent, but it's also safer.
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80In the first four new episodes, her characters remain in their self-contained cultural warp, still only just beginning to mingle with hipsters and hard drugs and cold, careering artists, and, yes, black people.
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75Girls can still be Girls. [21 Jan 2013]
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75Girls may not be something you ever want to see if you're not a 20-something-year-old woman living on the edge of disaster at all times. But if it is--and you are, too--you'll be happy to know that it still raw.
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70Season 2 has some nuanced writing and some cleverly observed moments. But there are also a number of grating elements on display as the season gets underway.
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70Season two finds more of the same, with strong moments surrounded by lots of irritating ones.
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60The first four episodes of this new season have the same raw and gritty-cool feel as the first season's (it takes no time at all for Dunham to bare her now-famously doughy naked body in a sex scene), but the show has become significantly more predictable.
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60Short scenes [are] designed to suggest we just walked in on random real people. It's a raw look that is, nonetheless, a look. It also, inevitably, says scripted TV drama.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 11 out of 24
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Mixed: 5 out of 24
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Negative: 8 out of 24
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HBO's worst show since Arliss. A ponderously unwatchable mess. That Girls gets so much respect from critics is one of television's greatest mysteries.
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10