Girlfriends, Fifth Season. Out Tuesday. (***3/10)
Paramount Home Entertainment releases the fifth season of Girlfriends on October 28th. As I said about the fourth season, the four stars in this sit-com are all terrible people. They are obnoxious, and irritating, and gold-digging and crazy and self-centred and stupid and lazy and conniving and backstabbing. Watching an entire season’s worth of women trying to one-up each other and screaming about their own needs could take a toll on one’s nerves. And mine are shot right now, as I write this review. The “girl” part of Girlfriends I understand. After all, the show is about four girls. The “friends” part confuses me. How these women can remain friends while being so LOUDLY into themselves is beyond me.
Season five of this show sees one of the girls trying to get back together with her husband, because she is pregnant. Why this man would even consider taking her back is beyond me. This woman is awful. Another woman struggles with the fact that she is in love with a man who confessed his love to her, but now he’s with another woman…straight out of Friends, I suppose. Another woman is publishing a book, and fighting with everyone around her because she is so powerfully self-centred and stupid. In fact, she appears to be much too stupid to write a book at all. I would suggest that most of the people in this show are too dumb and self-aggrandizing to accomplish most of the things that they do on the show.
Then there’s the laugh track. The reason sit-coms have a laugh track is that they need to tell you when things are funny, and it’s time to laugh. If you find yourself hearing the background laughter, and you didn’t laugh, and you’re not sure why, then you can know the people who made the show think that moment was funny. But you don’t. And you didn’t laugh, which means it actually wasn’t funny. In the first episode of Season Five of Girlfriends, there is a recurring joke about a lesbian chasing one of the main characters. And she keeps stopping the chase to take off her shoes. And the laugh track rolls. But then, you can tell that even the laugh track is half-hearted. Like, it’s a slow, quiet, rumbling of half-chuckle laughter in the background. One that gets quieter and quieter each time the gag is repeated. And deservedly so.
Girlfriends was cancelled after five seasons, so this was going to be the last one. But apparently it has, mystifyingly, just been renewed for several more seasons. At noon on Tuesdays somewhere in the states. Half-assed laugh tracks, self-centred, awful characters, and few compelling stories make this series one to skip. So skip it.