After years of The Hills, Jersey Shore, and Teen Mom, MTV has at last decided to stop with the gentle obfuscation and just launch a show called Dumb Girls, an umbrella term that covers an estimated 60 percent of its most successful programming. “Let’s all just be honest about what we want,” MTV seems to be saying, similar to when it finally dropped the pretense of caring about music. It may have seemed like an ideological fall from grace at the time, but the radically lowered expectations certainly have made it easier to accept its transition into sort of a TeenNick version of HBO, has it not?
Anyway, Dumb Girls continues those aspirations, hailing from Lauren Iungerich, the same creator/executive producer as the recently debuted Awkward., with the stylistically mandated “period” denoting it as an emotionless rejoinder used comically by young people, symbolizing that it is an “awkward period” in their lives, and reminding us that it is about young ladies who sometimes get their period, which is awkward. Dumb Girls follows that same trajectory, concerning a group of twentysomething females who are “smart in life but dumb in love,” which also describes several other in-development shows with similar titles, including Lena Dunham’s Girls and CBS’ Two Broke Girls. Still, these lack the refreshing candor that is Dumb Girls. Perhaps MTV’s new era of openness begins now, with Drunk Assholes and Young People With Too Much Money And No Particular Responsibility Find Reason To Complain Incessantly and Teenagers Almost Fucking to follow.