Sunday Girls: Veep, Girls & the Women of Mad Men

Sunday nights used to belong to Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte. Now, they are the province of the ladies of Girls, Veep and Mad Men.

The girls of Girls carry Carrie’s Sunday-night lady show mantle on HBO.

Girls most closely and self-consciously carries Carrie’s mantle. It’s got four modern, idiosyncratic female leads with quirky and imperfect lovers and clever, emotionally true dialogue. Unlike SATC, the rest of the details — the cramped, shared apartments, the less-than-flattering clothes, not-terribly-well-paying jobs — ring true, too. Too true.

In fact, after the very first episode, I couldn’t help but wonder if showrunner/star/plain-Jane “It” girl Lena Dunham had raided my old journals, or somehow gone back in time and psychically scooped up the insides of my 24-year-old brain. The plotlines seem based on feelings and actions I was certain could only be mine. I’m well past the age of the Girls girls, but their sense of wanting to become is still something I can easily call up. Scratch a middle-aged career woman, and I suspect you’ll find a younger self waiting for life to start not too far from the surface.

The Girls girls don’t have direct SATC analogues, although Dunham’s Hannah, as the writer and ruminator with her own downmarket but equally mercurial “Big,” is closest to Carrie, and Jessa — despite Shosh’s claim in one of the early episodes — is the likely Samantha, perhaps more for her adventurous confidence than her conquests.

The ladies of Mad Men are products of their time — but the times, they are a-changing.

Back over on AMC, it’s the same city but 45 years. For the ladies of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, navigating the Sexual Revolution as it happens is tricky business. The women of my generation walked into the tail end of it. And for the girls of Girls, the double-standard lingers on in its own slackerish way, but sexual harassment is so over it’s quaint. But for Joan, Peggy, Betty, Megan and, yes, even Sally becoming fully in charge of their lives happens in fits and starts, not pop songs or pithy one-liners.