Hipsters and Slackers: A Conversation About Girls and Spaced

The cast of Girls: Allison Williams (left), Jemima Kirke, Lena Dunham and Zosia Mamet.

Over its first three seasons, the HBO comedy Girls, created by and starring Lena Dunham, has quickly established itself as one of the most discussed shows on television. While Girls' combination of hip references, self-reflection and a frank, honest approach to relationships both physical and emotional have set it apart, it's not a wholly unprecedented work. As a snapshot of a particular brand of aimless wandering and pondering, one most readily associated with people in their twenties who are trying to figure out what they want to do with their lives, it shares a number of key similarities, in terms of its plots, character types and general milieu, with the seminal British sitcom Spaced. Like Girls, Spaced - written by and starring Simon Pegg and Jessica Hynes (née Stevenson) and directed by Edgar Wright - was about an aimless bunch of twenty-somethings which explored this same crucial age, albeit from a more pop-culture addled perspective, over two seasons which aired from 1999 to 2001.

After my friend, fellow History graduate and fan of both Girls and Spaced, Lewis Davies (no relation) said that he wanted to do a critical comparison of the two shows, I jumped at the chance to discuss two shows that I love, albeit for slightly different reasons. You can find that conversation below and you can follow Lewis on Twitter.

Ed: So, Lewis, I guess the first question would be what do you consider to be the broad similarities between Girls and Spaced, other than that they're both shows about white twenty-somethings who arguably don't have any real problems?

Film Review: Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)

Anyone who has ever read much music criticism will be familiar with the 'sophomore slump', the idea that artists may struggle to make a decent second album because they put all their best ideas into their first one. Often the problem results from trying so hard to recreate what was so special the first time around that they make something which seems old and tired almost as soon as it comes out. Few films better exemplify the cinematic equivalent of a sophomore slump than Star Trek Into Darkness, J.J. Abram's follow-up to his own 2009 reboot of the Star Trek franchise. It's not a bad film, though there are aspects of it which are terrible, but it tries so very hard to replicate the thrills of its predecessor that it loses much of the excitement that made it so winning.

Film Review: The World's End (2013)

They say that school days are the best days of your life. It's a lovely thought, especially since it conjures up images of youthful exuberance untainted by the responsibilities of adulthood, but also an insidious one. After all, for school days to be the best days of your life, everything afterwards has to be all downhill. All the excitement, joy and promise has to fizzle out into nothing, leaving only fond memories of a future that never came to pass. Gary King (Simon Pegg) not only sees school as the peak of his life, but one night in particular. Back in June of 1990, he and his friends Andy (Nick Frost), Steven (Paddy Considine), Oliver (Martin Freeman) and Pete (Eddie Marsan) embarked on an epic pub crawl through their home town of Newton Haven. They had intended to drink in all twelve drinking establishment along the fabled Golden Mile, but ultimately they failed. Regardless, it was the best night of Gary's life, and everything since then has been a sad, sorry decline.

Film Review: Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

Ever since Brian DePalma almost silently dangled Tom Cruise above a pressure-sensitive floor in the first Mission: Impossible, each subsequent film in the series has come to be defined by its most exhilarating and audacious set-piece. Whilst the series has added a fair deal of comedy and something resembling emotional development for Ethan Hunt (Cruise) since coming under the eye of J.J. Abrams, who directed the third film and serves as a producer on Ghost Protocol, those are still little more than spice. The meat of these films lies in their ability to deliver breathless spectacle. It's no coincidence that Mission: Impossible II, directed by the once-brilliant John Woo, was both the weakest film in the series and the one with no single standout action sequence. Without those wow moments, these films are little more than lumps of exposition broken up by running.

Film Review: Paul (2011)

Clive (Nick Frost) and Graeme (Simon Pegg) are a couple of British science fiction nerds who, after making a holy pilgrimage to that mecca of fandom, San Diego Comic-Con, embark upon a transcontinental road trip to visit sites associated with extraterrestrial activity. After antagonising a pair of redneck types (David Koechner and Jesse "Landry" Plemens) in a bar, they drive off in a hurry, inadvertently witnessing a night-time car crash. As they survey the wreckage, cigarette smoke and a gruff voice float across the desert air. Out of the shadows steps a little green man named Paul (voiced by Seth Rogen). Paul is an alien who has been held by the government for more than sixty years, and he has escaped in order to finally go home. Faced with the opportunity to befriend a bona fide alien, Clive and Graeme decide to help him, unaware that Paul will prove to be the least of their problems.