Cynical Cinema

Girlfriends is a TV sitcom that revolves around four African-American women who have relationship problems and job issues and talk woman talk. Think - Sex And The City, with a laugh track. I hate Sex and The City a lot, but the only thing I hate more is a laugh track. This show is not funny enough to be a good comedy, not interesting enough to be a good drama, and not sexy enough to be a good soap. So it just sort of meanders around. Occupying that middle ground between sitcom, soap opera, and dramatic show that was occupied successfully by Sex And the City for so many years, and never really replicated.

There is one girlfriend who is a horrible egotist gold-digger who wants to leave her husband because he went broke buying her jewelry. There is another one who is a horrible lazy mooch who moves around between the houses of her friends. There is another friend who is a horrible self-centred bitter mother of two. Whose kids we never meet. Do they exist at all? Or are they merely a reference point? And the fourth girlfriend, who is basically the centre of the show, the Carrie Bradshaw of Girlfriends, if you will, is more emotionally stable than the other three. But she is still irritating and does a lot of stupid things.

Then there are the supporting characters. The flamboyantly gay office assistant who dishes and sits cross-legged and chats with the ladies, one girl-bonding moment after another. The one who uses the term “girlfriend” like he invented it, and who peppers his speech with an exaggerated lisp and references to famous designers. You know that character? The one who was still kinda new in Will and Grace but is now one of the most painful cliches in pop culture? Or how about the scene where the girl believes the guy is going to ask her to marry him, and so she does all kinds of crazy things, and misunderstands everything he says, which all is basically on millimeter short of “will you marry me” without actually saying it, and then there’s the moment when she finds out that wasn’t his plan at all, and all those things he said are explained differently and incredibly implausibly, and then she is embarrassed and has egg on her face? Seen it before? Seen it more than forty times? If so, you’re still in the majority.

The worst thing about Girlfriends is that it is a sit-com. And it has a laugh track. And that means that the writers try to shoe-horn jokes in when there should be no jokes. And they try to make jokes out of things that aren’t funny. And the laugh track starts when nothing funny has been said. It’s like they need a joke and a laugh every ninety seconds exactly. So they cram in ripped-off lines from elsewhere in pop culture - “Vegas baby, Vegas!” Is about the height of this comedic writing. Which is pretty lame. The drama portion of this show could be decent, but with the tacked-on jokes and the irritating characters, who would care? Who cared about this show at all? Well, enough people to get eight seasons out of it, I guess. Season Four of Girlfriends comes out today, July 29th, from Paramount Home Entertainment.