The Girls Next Door

Daphne Merkin writes in Elle:

It was in aid of understanding my own puzzling interest and the equally puzzling interest of women such as my 31-year-old friend Alana Newhouse, who is an editor at a venerable century-old Jewish weekly by day and an obsessed Girls watcher by night, and of Liza Monroy, a 27-year-old writer who is publishing her first novel and takes pains to distinguish her own interest in the show from that of the masses, that I flew out to Los Angeles to meet with Hef and the girls. Honesty bids me admit that Holly, with her doelike eyes and mixture of dreaminess and steel, is the reason I was drawn into the show in the first place. (Her name is also the one-word answer Alana gives when I ask her why she is so riveted.) If you are of a mind, as I am, to deconstruct the show’s underlying metaphysics, it is possible to see Holly as both a romantically fixated heroine out of a Barbara Cartland novel (or, for that matter, out of Madame Bovary) and a shrewd, very contemporary cookie. There is an intensity to her as well as an inquiring mind—she’s always working on her French or boning up on historical facts—that is easier for me to identify with than Bridget’s boppy cheerleader approach or Kendra’s dazed personality and limited vocabulary (in which cool, great, and no way figure largely, when she’s not being bleeped for swearing).