In the tradition started, arguably, by Gen X, every generation since (not that there have been that many), has gotten their own “well I guess this is growing up”-type TV series. In the 1990s, it was obviously Friends—at least in terms of mainstream offerings that demonstrated to those going through the pains of their twenties that they weren’t alone. Because, in truth, one’s twenties being painful in this particular “postmodern” way didn’t happen until the 90s (hence, movies like Slacker, Reality Bites and Office Space highlighting the ills of working a job you hate or, sometimes just as bad, not being able to get a job at all). This due to a combination of more resistance to so-called adulthood than ever before and the fact that capitalism was starting to fail in more glaring ways than it ever had in the post-WWII era. In short, gone were the “prosperity days” of a “job for everyone”—something that only baby boomers got to experience.
And that scarcity phenomenon only worsened as what is still referred to as “late-stage capitalism” ramped up at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Just as, incidentally, Sex and the City was also ramping up, hitting its stride in popularity by season three, which aired in 2000. This, too, being a show about “mid-point” adults trying to “find their stride.” Even if mostly in romance rather than work. Indeed, both Friends and Sex and the City were largely more about the pratfalls of dating (back when dating was a thing) in one’s twenties and thirties than they were about the woes of basic survival. When Girls came along in 2012 as the supposed millennial answer to Sex and the City, that started to shift. Not so much because Lena Dunham veered away from focusing on romantic entanglements (albeit with far less glitz or commitment to them), but because it addressed, however absurdly (read: through a white girl lens), the difficulties of surviving. Not just in general, but especially in New York, where all of these “shows for a generation” take place (see also: the lesser-cited Felicity, in part because the characters are in college rather than freshly out of it).
When Sex and the City ended in 2004, so, too, did the era when TV bothered to depict something like “aspirationalism.” Parading characters that viewers could aspire to be like, even if only in their most unrealistic dreams. This was undoubtedly a result of the “post-Empire” dive that the U.S. took in the wake of 9/11. For three years afterward, SATC shouldered on as usual with its conveyance of “the glamorous life,” but that only made the show feel more unbelievable. More ungrounded in reality. And while millennials may have watched the show in their teen years (and hopefully not before that point), it was in their twenties when Girls came to roost, shattering illusions that it was even possible to make it in the “big city” without parental backing (at least as a blanca). So while there is a natural and knee-jerk reaction of disgust when the pilot episode of Girls finds Hannah Horvath (Dunham) being “cut off” by her parents after two additional years of post-collegiate support, it’s not far from the truth of how many people could still afford to live in New York in the post-Gen X heyday: their parents. Or, as Hannah wields by way of argument for staying on the tit, “All my friends get help from their parents.”
So it is that Girls broke the “rules” established by Sex and the City, demystifying any sense of “effortless opulence” by making it part of the show that none of these girls (note: not billed as women) are financially stable on their own. The rules were also broken by bringing parents into the narrative at all, something that Michael Patrick King, SATC’s primary writer and director, said he deliberately never chose to do on SATC because in New York, you never meet people’s parents. This being, in his mind, part of the “rebirth”/“reinvention” process that happens upon moving there. Ergo, becoming an “independent entity.”
Well, that wasn’t the case for the millennial generation, hence Girls being all in on parental depiction. Even so, the comparisons made between Girls and SATC—mostly because, again, it’s about four women and their “dating” (read: sex) lives in New York—were enough to warrant the former series paying homage to it in the first episode. This done through the “Charlotte” of the group, Shoshanna Shapiro (Zosia Mamet). It’s she who welcomes the “Samantha” of the group, Jessa Johansson (Jemima Kirke), her British, “bohemian” (this word always used on people who aren’t really that) cousin. When allowing her into her room, Shoshanna asks if she likes the Sex and the City poster she has taped up on her wall. Jessa, in “too cool” fashion, says she’s never seen it. That doesn’t stop Shoshanna from explaining, “You’re definitely like a Carrie, but with, like, some Samantha aspects and Charlotte hair.” But no, for the purposes of reducing this show to the same archetypes as SATC, Hannah is the Carrie. Which, yes, makes her the most annoying, narcissistic one. In addition to being “the writer” of the group. But, of course, both women’s writing—when one does hear it read aloud—recalls the Daria sentiment (in reference to her sister, Quinn), “I don’t need tutoring to write like her. Just some big crayons.”
While Girls tested the limits of how low things could sink in terms of millennial representation (this includes the somewhat on-the-nose playing of MGMT’s “Time to Pretend” while Ray [Alex Karpovsky] mixes some opium flowers into a tea during the pilot), it set a precedent for the gradual dropping of standards. This with regard to both jobs and romantic relationships (on a side note: in many ways, the still underrated Search Party achieves what Girls thinks it did, millennials-flailing-in-Brooklyn-wise). And, if millennial-preceding generations (mainly baby boomers) were appalled by what they saw, they had no idea how much lower (and lamer) things could get. For, in the generation that followed, the increasing pervasiveness of the internet in their lives subsumed all other facets of it. To the point where colleges now need to teach a class on how to use the phone for an actual call. This “old-timey” practice being anathema to a generation that’s only ever known the convenience of texting through various chat-based apps.
These are just some of the small details that add up to a larger incompetence in Adults (a title unspokenly meant to have quotation marks around it), the first “sophisticated” show to attempt distilling life in New York for Gen Zers into something “voice of a generation-y.” Created by Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw, writing and romantic partners (recently engaged, which isn’t very Gen Z), some of those “small details” include trying to get a check from the bank to pay for a company called Peter’s Heaters to repair the boiler so that Samir (Malik Elassal) and the other three friends who have taken up residence at his parents’ house can start enjoying hot showers again.
Like Sex and the City and Girls, Adults, too, favors a quartet of friends to anchor the story of “a generation.” And Gen Z’s is simply that they’re even more incompetent, inept and ill-informed than those who came before them. At least this time around, however, there are better, more genuine attempts at “inclusivity” (which is more than can be said for Lena Dunham getting Donald Glover to guest star as the token Black boyfriend—not just any Black boyfriend though, a Republican one). So it is that Issa (Amita Rao) and Anton (Owen Thiele) comprise the Brown and Black “quota” for the group, with Samir and Billie (Lucy Freyer) being the blancos. And yes, they’re the two with the connection that goes the furthest back. To round out the group is the sexually fluid Paul Baker (Jack Innanen), one of those people perennially addressed by his first and last name. Paul ends up in the mix thanks to dating Issa, who oftentimes channels the energy, intonation and worldview of Ilana Wexler (Ilana Glazer), one of the two main characters in Broad City (which is also a way better “millennial show set in NYC” than Girls).
As for Thiele being on another recent series that focuses on Gen Zers (even though Overcompensating is ambiguous with its time period), perhaps he really is becoming the voice of his generation…at least on TV (a medium that is, again, not very Gen Z). And it is his character who often displays the highest level of competence (which, granted, isn’t saying much), complete with having a job he can actually manage to hold. Unlike Billie, who gets fired for trying to take advantage of what Issa calls “the window” after a former classmate of theirs named Kyle gets briefly famous for receiving a $200,000 settlement in the wake of enduring sexual harassment at this workplace.
So it is that Issa, Anton and Paul all insist this is the time—the window—when “elders” at work get hyper-uppity about ensuring they’re being nice/accommodating to the younger workers at the company. Billie doesn’t quite find that to be true as she ends up saying a series of awkward things to her boss (e.g., “you should be careful”) that result in her getting the expected “termination” email in the second episode, “Spitroast.” Titled as such because, thanks to Samir being her medical power of attorney, multiple tubes are stuck up Billie’s various orifices after she, let’s say, has a snafu with her asshole that leads to the need for other tests. All of which Samir insists on having done at the same time since her insurance is going to be cancelled soon thanks to being fired. Of course, the twist is that Billie never had insurance through them to begin with, so Samir racked her up a fifteen-thousand-dollar medical bill for no good reason. Such is the level of incompetence we’re dealing with.
The same goes for something as basic as making a roast chicken. Hence, the title of episode six, “Roast Chicken.” During which not only does Billie try to act like “adults” do by having a dinner party with Andrew (Charlie Cox), her ex-high school English teacher-turned-boyfriend, as the guest of honor, but also during which Kronengold and Shaw pull out the big guns by getting playwright Sanaz Toossi to write the episode and having Julia Fox cameo as herself at the “dinner party.” Because, long story short, Paul wants to invite his friend, “Jules,” over for the occasion as well. And while this ends up irritating a jealous Issa (turns out, Gen Z isn’t as “poly” as it thinks it is), who didn’t know he meant Julia Fox, it’s the least of Samir’s concerns. For it is Samir that gets saddled with Andrew’s confession that he’s taken a “pony dose” of ketamine. Since, apparently, no matter what age you are in New York, you’re forever in crisis—meaning forever amenable to doing drugs. And yes, Andrew is technically a millennial, which means he ought to “know better” by now. Alas, you can’t teach the generation that, like, invented the concept of a “kidult” how to “adult” (that’s right, much to the dismay of many, millennials are also responsible for turning the word “adult” into a verb).
But at least while millennials were (and are) failing and flailing, they still had their finger on the pulse of all aspects of culture, and didn’t need to be “informed” on what was trending by TikTok. The app almost single-handedly responsible for decimating Gen Z’s attention span and knowledge of anything other than what’s expressly put in front of them. Which is why the only time they’re capable of watching movies is via the short clips that are “provided.” Ergo, a running joke throughout the series being for one of the friends to comment something to the effect of, “Very Phantom Thread” and the another to say, “Never seen it.” Thereby prompting the admission of the commenter, “No, me neither.”
In the seventh episode, “Annabelle,” “elder” Gen Z meets its match in a younger Gen Zer named, what else, Annabelle (Lilah Guaragna). In town to get an abortion (with Issa having offered up her “services” to “house” the stranger teen while she goes through her ordeal), she’s saddled with Anton and Paul instead of Issa (who has a work thing involving a children’s play rehearsal). Much to the horror of both parties. And while Anton assumes that she’ll be “obsessed” with him the way every other teenager is, there is nothing that either he or Paul can do to make her think they’re anything other than losers. Not just because they’re poor and can’t take her to Wicked, but also because she keeps going on about wanting to see Sarah Jessica Parker’s house like her friend who also came to NY to get an abortion did. Paul is the first to admit he doesn’t know who that is. Later, Annabelle will also admit she doesn’t really know who that is (in addition to being unashamed to ask, “Can I see where 9/11 was filmed?”—all in keeping with Gen Z viewing 9/11 as little more than a meme). This little “confession” serves as the ultimate irony in terms of highlighting how a show that started out as the blueprint for glamorizing the NYC living experience for twenty- and thirty-somethings, then devolving into what Dunham hath wrought with Girls, can now be virtually “unknown” to a certain type of person in Gen Z.
With Girls, Manhattan was swapped out for Brooklyn. With Adults (which, despite being a comedy, also bears the same self-seriousness as Friends and Girls with its one-word, all-encompassing-but-meant-to-be-loaded title), Brooklyn has now been swapped out for “the shit-taint” of Queens, and trying to make it on your own in very fraught, unstable ways has been replaced by just living at your parents’ house while they’re ostensibly on a permanent vacation (perhaps the eventual comedic “plot twist” will be that Samir and co. killed them to take over the lodging).
So while Adults is possibly the most “solid” offering (read: one that can be watched by multiple generations) of what it means to “be Gen Z now” (even if its creators are major cuspers à la Benito Skinner), it doesn’t make it come across any less like a pale imitation of its predecessors in the genre (though that could also be because life in general is currently a pale imitation of itself). Worse still, it makes Gen Z look even more stunted than millennials. Not just emotionally, but also in terms of being able to function on the most basic of levels, illustrated by the series culminating with the group finally deciding to open the mail that’s been overflowing from the box for weeks, probably months. But maybe we should just be grateful that they know what the mail is at all.
