Girls, Sky Atlantic - TV review: Lena Dunham's foursome continue to grow up disgracefully

Thought the Girls might have got less self-obsessed by series five? No chance.

Lena Dunham and Jemima Kirke in 'Girls' (HBO)

Lena Dunham’s Girls were all on fine, awful form in this fifth series opener, an episode that would have satisfied fans, if not won them any new friends.

Hannah (Dunham), Marnie (Allison Williams) Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) and Jessa (Jemima Kirke) seem to get worse with age and outside Brooklyn, as this episode was set, it’s plainer than ever they have nothing in common apart from the past. Somehow though, they all ended up as Marnie’s bridesmaids, I suspect because no one else would put up with her self-absorbed terribleness.

This episode followed the build –up to her wedding to the even more obnoxious Desi (Ebon Moss-Bachrach). As the girls bitched and sniped and rowed with the hairdresser, Desi had a freakout about his eighth (eighth!?) engagement and went and jumped in a pond. Is anyone, anywhere really that melodramatic? Elsewhere, Hannah managed to make it all about her – and still fitted in some tension-relieving sex with boyfriend Fran – and Shosh, as Jessa noted, had become “even more like a cartoon character” since moving to Japan.

I think Jessa nailed it really: all the girls are all in danger of tipping into caricature territory occasionally. While the acting’s still a cut above, the things that surprised and compelled us in the early series – the comfortable nudity, the messy, real sex - don’t feel as fresh as they once did in this penultimate one. But because we’ve come to know these characters and invested in them, we want to keep watching to see how their stories end.