HBO

If last week’s season premiere was the leadup to the inevitable conversation about race that Girls has needed, last night's episode, “I Get Ideas,” finally delivered, with mixed results.

When Girls premiered last year, so many pop culture–loving feminists had pinned hopes on the show that it disappointment was almost inevitable. In a raft of post–Season 1 interviews, Dunham hinted that many critiques of the show—chief among them the issue of its attitude toward race—would be addressed in Season two.

Last night I pried myself away from the hot bodies of the London Games to watch a documentary about a different group of people who make their living with their hot bodies: supermodels. Timothy Greenfield Sanders' feature-length HBO film About Face: Supermodels Then and Now gives viewers plenty to look at but, like they say about beauty itself, this documentary is only skin deep.

Dear HBO,

I've been watching your miniseries, Weight of the Nation, and though you have some good information, I am largely disappointed. Not that I’m all that surprised—the title alone employs the same old fat-shaming rhetoric. "Look at these fat people!" your show says. Yeah yeah, health problems, diabetes, etc., blah blah. LOOK THEY’RE FAT. 

OK, so we've all seen it now, yes? Let's discuss.


Sup, GIRLS?

We haven't seen Lena Dunham's hotly anticipated HBO series Girls yet (Jay-Z, send us those screeners if you're done with them, please), but this review by Asawin Suebsaeng for Mother Jones has us a little nervous for Sunday night.

Much of the publicity for the new HBO documentary Gloria: In Her Own Words tells us that the movie was made because young people don't know who Steinem is. As people who are currently reading/writing feminist blog content, you and I probably aren't who they're talking about. Still, whether you're a seasoned veteran of the feminist movement or one of these young whippersnappers the media are warning us about, the biopic is worth a watch.

Last night's episode of True Blood contained the usual outrageous plot twists and soap opera-levels of drama, which is great and which is why I (and probably you if you're reading this) look forward to summer Sunday nights. However, it also contained a totally fucked-up gang rape scene which the show's creators (and many media outlets) are calling anything but.

Boardwalk Empire, the new HBO series from a Sopranos alum that is probably best known to you for trumpeting its association with Martin Scorcese all around town, premiered Sunday night. I expect that the jury is going to be out in this show for some time. That's at least true for me. I've learned, through hard experience, not to judge these high-end cable shows based on their first hour. These things are slow burns, not forest fires; I actually can't think of too many of them that managed to get all their cards on the table in the premiere. When you have eleven or twelve hours to go, you usually lose much of the first episode to setup.

The show is set in 1920s Atlantic City, New Jersey, and centers around the life of Enoch "Nucky" Johnson (Steve Buscemi), a casino-owner gangster type. (The character is allegedly based on a real-life figure.) Prohibition is newly begun, and Nucky's already playing politics with the local women's temperance union, where he meets Margaret (Kelly Macdonald), a pregnant Irishwoman trapped in a bad marriage from which it seems inevitable that Nucky will liberate her. Meanwhile, his second-in-command, Jimmy (Michael Pitt), changed by the front lines of the Great War, is growing impatient with his income level and social status, and is eager to get scamming and killing, much to the comparatively laid-back Nucky's dismay. Meanwhile, the Internal Revenue Service is beginning to watch the gangster activity in AC more closely, with Agent Van Alden (Michael Shannon) at the helm.

As even that preliminary list of actors should indicate, no expense has been spared as to casting the show, which is chock full of faces you'll recognize from other series, including Michael Kenneth Williams (The Wire's quixotic Omar) and even Molly Parker (Deadwood's Alma Garret) in a framed photograph of Nucky's "dead" wife. The look of the show, though beautiful, is a little clean for the subject matter, all bright eyes and scrubbed faces and red lipstick, without a trace of grime or dirt. Even the eruptions of flesh and blood from the show's many gangster shootouts are clinical and clean in a way. That's probably just the Scorcese influence. And perhaps I've become too used to the sepia, nouveau-grime aesthetic of most of HBO's other period pieces like Carnivale and Deadwood.