Blogs and Tumblrs and Twitters—the status updates of the heart, the echo chambers of an era, the mirrors in which the parakeets of Generation Y Not Me? look at themselves and says, "Who's a pretty, underappreciated birdy?"—are, of course, the TV shows of tomorrow. Particularly if these Tumblr-bloggy-Twitter things are created by twentysomething females who are just as adorably directionless, yet adorably savvy about being directionless, as Lena Dunham.
First there was Fox's acquisition of Adulting, a J.J. Abrams-produced comedy based on Kelly Williams Brown's blog and book of the same name, which offers seemingly-obvious-but-apparently-not advice to youngsters awkwardly transitioning into having to pay rent and deal with people and stuff—advice such as "Make A Good Impression On Potential Future Landlords" and "Facebook Is Not A Good Place To Say Serious Things." Then came CBS' 20-Nothings, loosely based on Lauren Bachelis' Hollywood Assistants Tumblr, which captures the unique, frustrated voice of film industry underlings by putting things like "When My Boss Laughs At My Joke" over an animated GIF of Saturday Night Live's Gilly she found on the Internet. And now, not to be left out of an obvious trend, NBC is adapting the Tumblr and book Fuck! I'm In My Twenties—written by Emma Koenig, the younger sister of Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig— that chronicles "the plight of today's millennials" (as captured by the 24-year-old daughter of Upper West Side Manhattanites) through the crafting of whimsical lists and doodles like the one on the left.
All of these shows have already been or will be compared to Girls (inevitably followed by a denial of that comparison), given that they're all intended to capture, as Bachelis puts it, "what it feels like to be someone’s subordinate, having people telling you what to do and also your parents telling you what to do. And to just be in this weird life phase" where you're not immediately a huge success right out of college, and you have to get by for a few years making cute, ephemeral things on the Internet, until they're optioned for a show by networks desperately chasing the zeitgeist. And everyone can relate to that. Anyway, if you're a twentysomething female in a hip city, and you've yet to put your own musings about how occasionally difficult that is into a lucrative Tumblr, you deserve all the very minor setbacks you get.