Judd Apatow flies off the handle when reporters criticize nudity, minority representation in HBO's hit dramedy
HBO’s “Girls” has drawn a fair amount of media attention since its premier in 2012. It features frequent nudity on the part of star and creator Lena Dunham’s character.
She’s taken a lot of flak for her bold choices, most notably last year “king of all media” Howard Stern openly referred to her as “a fat little chick who kinda looks like Jonah Hill.” Dunham typically responds with something like the following, which she issued in an exchange with a reporter questioning her nudity at a Thursday session with the Television Critics Association:
“I don’t get the purpose of all the nudity on the show — by [Dunham] in particular,” the reporter said, according to EW. “I feel like I’m walking into a trap where you go, ‘Nobody complains about all the nudity on “Game of Thrones,”’ but I get why they do it. They do it to be salacious and titillate people. And your character is often nude at random times for no reason.”
“It’s because it’s a realistic expression of what it’s like to be alive, I think, and I totally get it,” Dunham replied. “If you are not into me, that’s your problem, and you are going to have to kind of work that out with professionals.”
Often, Dunham brushes off those kinds of derisions, refusing to comment at all. That’s not always the case with “Girls” producers Judd Apatow and Jenni Konner, apparently.
“That was a very clumsily stated question that’s offensive on its face, and you should read it and discuss it with other people how you did that,” Apatow said in response to the same question by the same reporter, who was not addressing Apatow. “It’s very offensive.”
Later on, Jenni Konner was not OK. “I literally was spacing out because I’m in such a rage spiral about that guy,” she said. “I was just looking at him and going into this rage [over] this idea that you would talk to a woman like that and accuse a woman of showing her body too much. The idea of it just makes me sort of sick.”
Apatow’s responses were much more hand-wringy when the producers handled questions about “Girls'” lack of a regular minority character, despite taking place in New York City, perhaps the most diverse locale on the planet.
“I don’t think that there’s any reason why any show should feel an obligation to do that,” he said. “In the history of television, you could look at every show on TV and say, ‘How come there’s not an American Indian on this show?’ ‘How come there’s not an Asian person on this show?’ It really has to come from the story and the stories that we are trying to tell.”
Season 3 of “Girls” premiers this Sunday on HBO at 9 p.m.
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