Author: Hilary Lewis

March 06, 2016 7:30pm PT by Hilary Lewis

Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) in ‘Girls’  Courtesy of HBO

The actress talks to THR about her character’s romantic developments and the decision she makes in the episode’s final seconds.

[Warning: The following story contains spoilers about Girls‘ fifth-season episode, “Japan”]

Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) loves Japan, and she’s not coming home — even after getting fired from the job that made her move.

The third episode of Girls‘ fifth season took viewers to Japan, where Shoshanna has been happily working and living for several months after landing a job there at the end of the fourth season.

But midway through the episode, she finds out that she’s been fired or, rather, “managed out” of her job. While she doesn’t want to go back, Shoshanna seems to have resigned herself to returning, telling her friends that she can’t afford to stay and packing her suitcase. But in the show’s final seconds, standing out on the balcony of her colorful apartment, she changes her mind, turns around and starts unpacking. Meanwhile, her instant soup mogul boyfriend Scott (Jason Ritter), who’d been excitedly awaiting her return, is left standing alone at the airport until he realizes she’s not coming.

Girls co-showrunner Jenni Konner said that she knew “immediately” that while Shoshanna would fit in perfectly in Japan, it wouldn’t be an entirely pleasant trip.

Konner explained that she had the idea to send Shoshanna to Japan after she visited the country and kept sending Lena Dunham “pictures of Shoshannas.”

“I was like, ‘We have to send her here. We have to see what it’s like.’ So we had this idea that she can’t find a job all year, and then she finally finds this gig and she has to move to Japan,” Konner says. “What’s she going to do? She actually finds out that she loves it, and then she gets downsized, which is a real reality. So it becomes, now what do you do? We had to f— with her. There was no way we were just going to let her be happy there. This is Girls.”

But apart from loving her new environment, what prompts her to stay?

Konner speculates, “I think that Shoshanna has a lot of pride and I think the idea of going back — like she’s really judgmental of the rest of the girls, like she’s always telling them what assholes they are and how flaky they are — and I think she would feel embarrassed to go back that quickly.”

So what’s next for Shoshanna, once again without a job, but in Japan? At the press day for Girls‘ fifth season Mamet was reluctant to talk about what’s to come but she did offer some insight into why Shoshanna decides to stay; what’s behind her romantic pursuit of her boss, Yoshi (Hiro Mizushima); how she feels about Scott; and more.

Why do you think Shoshanna loves Japan and responds really well to being there? I think she feels sort of akin to the culture and something about the way everyone is there and the aesthetics of the place sort of speaks to parts of her that are allowed to thrive while she’s there.

In the season premiere, Shoshanna says something about not wanting to “rock the boat” by seeing Scott at Marnie’s (Allison Williams) wedding. And she doesn’t invite him to join her. Why doesn’t she want to see him? I think she wants to break up with him, but she doesn’t have the balls to do it. So she just doesn’t tell him that she’s home.

How much of that [her wanting to break up with Scott] is behind her pursuing things with Yoshi? I think that’s all of it. I think when people want to break up with someone but they don’t know how to, they’ll cheat and sabotage the relationship and that breaks it up for them.

She says in the third episode that she’s “moved away” from her problems to Japan. Is she just talking about Scott or is she talking about some other stuff too? I think she was having a real rough go at it at home for a while with the job search and with the other girls and with Scott and I think Japan feels like a new lease on life to her.

Do you think that’s why she doesn’t want to leave and return to everything back in New York when she’s faced with that situation? I think part of it is she really loves it in Japan … And then I think also, yeah, coming back home is coming back to reality.

At the end of the episode, she’s packed her bag and is standing on that balcony and she seems to decide in that moment to stay. What’s going through her mind in that scene? I think getting fired and having to leave and come back home was like losing a battle, like being defeated, and I think in that moment, it’s kind of like a ‘f— it’ moment where she’s like, ‘No, I’m not going to let losing my job make me leave this place that I love. I’m going to stay and I’m going to live it up and I’m going to make it work.’ I think that’s what that moment is for her.

What was it like filming in Japan? It was crazy. It was a really wild experience. We basically shot all day everyday and it was insanely hot and it was sort of a crash course in Tokyo while filming a TV show. It was pretty wild … I had to speak a little bit of Japanese for the show, but I learned it bit by bit and I’ve since forgotten all of it.

What did you think of “Japan,” and what do you think Shoshanna will do next? Sound off in the comments.

Girls

March 02, 2016 6:09am PT by Hilary Lewis

 Michael Yarish/Netflix

The Netflix revival of the long-running ABC sitcom debuted last Friday.

Netflix’s Fuller House has been renewed for a second season, it was announced on Wednesday.

The revival of the long-running ABC sitcom started streaming on Friday and stars returning castmembers Candace Cameron Bure, Jodie Sweetin and Andrea Barber.

In an update to the Full House premise, Cameron Bure’s D.J. Tanner-Fuller is a recently widowed mother of three boys who moves back into her family home, along with sister Stephanie (Sweetin) and best friend Kimmy Gibler (Barber), who join her to help raise D.J.’s kids and Kimmy’s daughter Ramona (Soni Bringas).

Bringas is just one of the newcomers that play the Fuller House kids. D.J.’s sons are played by Michael Campion (Jackson), Elias Harger (Max) and Dashiell and Fox Messitt, who share the role of baby Tommy.

Although anticipation for the series, revived after nearly 20 years off the air, was high among nostalgic fans of the original hit, part of ABC’s “TGIF” lineup, critics largely panned Fuller House.

The renewal news was announced in the tweet below.

Like the original series, Fuller House is executive produced by Jeff Franklin and Robert L. Boyett, with John Stamos joining as an executive producer. Full House creator Franklin served as showrunner for Fuller House‘s first season.

Stamos is also among the Full House stars who make recurring guest appearances in the series’ first season, a list that includes Bob Saget, Dave Coulier, Lori Loughlin and Blake and Dylan Tuomy-Wilhoit (who played Jesse and Becky’s twins, Nicky and Alex). Noticeably absent among the returning stars are Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, who rose to fame playing Michelle Tanner.

The first season includes a number of references to Michelle, including Saget’s Danny saying in the pilot that she’s not there because she’s “busy in New York running her fashion empire,” after which the full cast looks directly at the camera for several seconds. Indeed, the Olsens have become successful fashion designers in New York.

Franklin, who says that scene was meant to be a “playful wink” not a dig, has said the door is open for the Olsens to return to the show.

A second-season pickup was expected for Fuller House but hadn’t been officially announced before Wednesday.

Fuller House is just one of several TV series revivals and sequels that have popped up recently, including The X-Files, Heroes, Girl Meets World and Netflix’s forthcoming Gilmore Girls revival.

Netflix Netflix

February 21, 2016 7:30pm PT by Hilary Lewis

 Courtesy of HBO

Jenni Konner reveals how much the HBO show’s fifth season storylines were written with an end game in mind and talks about season-premiere surprises from Desi, Jessa and Adam.

[Warning: The following story contains spoilers about Girls’ fifth-season premiere, “Wedding Day.”]

HBO’s Girls began its second-to-last season on Sunday night with Marnie Michaels (Allison Williams) taking a big step into adulthood by marrying her boyfriend and musical partner Desi (Ebon Moss-Bachrach).

Marnie’s wedding comes as the main characters in the series about four female friends in their 20s navigating life in New York are finally, at least trying, to grow up—sort of.

“This is the time when the girls are like, ‘We’re really going to try to grow up a little bit’,” co-showrunner Jenni Konner tells The Hollywood Reporter. “And it’s Girls, so it won’t work as easily as making that decision, but I think they’re really [trying].”

One of those “grown-up” choices is Hannah’s (Lena Dunham) decision to pursue a relationship with her fellow teacher, Fran (Jake Lacy). The final moments of season four showed that the two had become a couple, six months after she rejected the advances of ex-boyfriend Adam (Adam Driver), and at the start of the fifth season they’re still going strong despite some differences of opinion.

“This is [Hannah saying,] ‘I’m going to date a guy who I think is normal, who doesn’t have crazy sex fantasies that I have to fulfill where I’m like a prostitute walking down the street or things like that and who isn’t kind of an insane person and who I actually like.’ She feels like he is good for her,” Konner says. “And she’s sort of willing to tolerate the [occasional disagreement] as if Fran is like the health food of her life.”

With Girls set to end after season six, with HBO renewing it for that final installment, Konner says that “a lot” of the season five storylines were written with the show’s end game in mind.

“Especially the second half of the season,” Konner adds. “That’s when we really knew and really were going for it. I do think when we knew we were going to end for sure then what we knew was that time was ticking on the stories, and so it’s like speak now or forever hold your peace.”

It’s also only a matter of time before Marnie discovers what Hannah and Fran learn in the fifth season premiere: that Marnie is the eighth woman to whom Desi has gotten engaged and that the ring he gave her was meant for his ex-girlfriend.

“Whenever we find out a secret, which is pretty rare that we learn a secret that the character doesn’t know, then it’s just a ticking time bomb,” Konner says. “So you’ll see it play out.”

For the moment, though, Hannah not telling Marnie that gossip was another grown-up choice Girls‘ narcissistic main character made.

“It was making this choice not to tear it all down based on something she’d heard,” Konner says. “Who even knows what the truth is about that story? She just chose to let it go. And I’m not saying that’s the right or the wrong answer but I do think it’s a step for Hannah towards adulthood, sort of toward the, ‘This is actually none of my business at the end of the day.’ Because it’s not like she found out he was a murderer, you know what I mean.”

Someone who also doesn’t choose to ruin the wedding is Alex Karpovsky’s Ray, who seems quite despondent about the “love of [his] life” getting married and how he’s not able to “pull a Graduate” and get her back.

“He doesn’t really have it in him to make more of a spectacle out of it and I think that’s partially rooted in the fact that he isn’t the bravest person in the world, but I think it’s also rooted in the fact that he doesn’t want to ruin this beautiful day that these people have chosen to put together,” Karpovsky tells THR. “He kind of feels like that’s rude in some way. He has very mixed feelings about it. But ultimately Marnie’s still an object of desire and to see Marnie become a married woman is very, very difficult for him.”

As for what Marnie and Ray’s dynamic will be like now that she’s married, Karpovsky says, “I think that their relationship—it was strained to begin with—but now I think it’s strained with an additional healthy dose of frustration on Ray’s part. It’s a lot harder to pull a woman away when she’s full-on married to someone, I think, in Ray’s mind. And so when she was dating Desi, it was such a volatile relationship that there would be these gaps where they would have these huge fights and things like that, and I think Ray always had this notion that we could get together or that possibility was there but now that she’s married, that has gone away and been replaced by a form of frustration.”

Despite all of this, Ray ends up being the one who unintentionally talks Desi into going through with the wedding after the groom has a panic attack and throws himself into a pond. Yet Desi’s convinced because he completely misinterprets what Ray’s trying to say.

“I think what Ray is hoping in that speech he gives to Desi in the pond is [for Desi to realize] that Desi and Marnie are not right for each other,” Karpovsky says. “And they have destinies and their destinies are not intersecting destinies, and he’s getting in the way of her fulfilling her own destiny. I think Ray is hoping that this will really sink in with Desi and he’ll man up and have this moment of clarity, this road to Damascus moment, and finally pull back on this wedding.”

Another somewhat odd couple spending time together in the fifth-season premiere were Adam and Jessa (Jemima Kirke), who took the friendship they’d established in season four to the next level with a kiss at the wedding. While Konner was quick to say she couldn’t talk about what’s next for Hannah’s friend and her ex, Konner did share what was behind their brief make-out session.

“We started to hint at that last year; we knew it was coming,” she says. “They’re too people who are almost too volatile and too sexual and too reckless that it feels a little bit like it’s only a matter of time, and I don’t think there was anything going on behind Hannah’s back in that way. I do think they built a friendship through AA and it started to turn and they’re both really freaked out about that possibility.”

What did you think of “Wedding Day” and what’s next for Jessa and Adam and Shoshanna, briefly back from Japan, and her instant-soup-mogul boyfriend (Jason Ritter) whom she chose not to invite to Marnie’s wedding? Sound off in the comments.

Girls