Cynical Cinema

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.

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.