Much of what happened throughout the third episode of Season Two seemed a deliberate attempt to move outside the viewer’s comfort zone – but for me the magic didn’t happen.  Though I’ve been a huge fan of the show since it’s debut last season, so far this year, I’ve been disappointed and last night’s episode seemed to hit a new low.  In many ways, it seemed that Lena Dunham was pushing the edge of the envelope just for the sake of being bold and daring.

To recap: As part of her writing assignment, Hannah decides to experiment with cocaine along with her Elijah, her ex-boyfriend and current gay roommate. When she tries to get the drug from Laird, a junkie in her building, she discovers that he’s a recovering addict.   Laird, clearly smitten with Hannah, says he’ll get it for her anyway — and the adventure begins.  She and Elijah end up in a nightclub snorting coke off a toilet seat.  Hanna trades shirts with a guy on the dance floor and spends the rest of the episode in a yellow mesh tanktop, her nipples in full view.

Meanwhile, Marnie hooks up with Booth Jonathan, a creepy artist who takes her to his place and locks her up in a dreadful art installation where she’s surrounded by jarring noises and video screens  showing images of animals and screaming babies.  Later, they have sex and he encourages her to look at a doll who’s watching from the side of the bed.   Very creepy.

There’s a big fight scene after Hannah learned that Marnie had sex with Elijah (“Maybe I’m bi,” he said.). And the show ends with Hannah in hallway making out with Laird, but telling him, “It’s just for tonight.”  You’re kind of left with the feeling that these girls are even more messed up than you thought.

Obviously you don’t have to like Hannah and her pals to like the show.  (Aside from Soshanna and Charlie, I don’t think any of them are particularly likable.)  Nor do the escapades of the cast have to seem believable for the show to be enjoyable.  But in the first season, the edginess of Girls seemed to be there for a reason: To capture the craziness of twenty-something life.  This season, the edginess seems to be there for its own sake — and for me it isn’t working.

What about for you?

Last night’s first episode of the second season of Girls touched on much the same theme.  Both left me wondering how much different dating really is today from when we were that age.

Ever since it debuted last year, I’ve been a huge fan of the HBO show. (Along apparently with everyone else: Girls won a Golden Globe last night for Best TV Comedy Series, and producer Dunham won a Best Actress award.)  Still, I have to say that I didn’t think the first episode of this season was all that great.  Hopefully, it was just setting the scene for what’s ahead and updating us what everyone is up to, relationship-wise. To recap:

Click here to view the embedded video.

° Hannah and Adam are no longer together, although she’s spending plenty time taking care of him and the leg that he broke in a car accident last season.  Adam claims to be totally in love with Hannah, but she’s now involved with Sandy, played by black actor Donald Glover. (A conspicuous response to widespread criticism last season that the show was “too white”?)   Hannah also living with Elijah, her ex-boyfriend who, as it turns out, is gay and is now dating George, an older guy who, we learn, “pays for everything.”

° To extent that they were ever together, Shoshanna has “broken up” with Ray, the guy to whom she lost her virginity last season.  She’s pissed at the way he treated her — but not pissed enough to reconnect with him at a party.

° Marnie is floundering: She doesn’t have a job (she got fired) or a boyfriend (last season she broke up with Charlie, her college sweetheart.) Now she’s lost and lonely  — and confused enough to crawl into Charlie’s bed at the end of the show. “I just want to sleep next to someone,” she says.

° Too soon to tell what’s going on with Jessa and Thomas-John, the Wall Street guy she impulsively married at the end of last season.  But instinct tells me that drama is in store

Millennial dating?  Yup, it’s complicated.

But I’m not sure how much different the dating scene is, at its core, from how it was a generation ago.  Obviously, there are certain new variables:  Unfriending someone on Facebook or being able to send an instant text message definitely puts a new twist on romantic dynamics.   And, if the cast on Girls is any indication, more people are hooking up a little more casually — and getting naked more quickly — than most of us did when we were that age.

But to me, the overall experience of the twenty-something dating scene seems very much the same.  Experimentation. Guilt. Jealousy. Hurt. Confusion.  Isn’t that what lots of people go through as they struggle to figure out what’s really important in a partner and what they really want?  Really, isn’t that what this decade of life is all about?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.  Is the “courtship” experience of today’s young people — as portrayed on Girls and the New York Times— really all that much different from what you went through at that age?

Please weigh in.

Photo: HBO/Everett Collection

Last season, I couldn’t wait for Sunday nights so I could watch the half-hour episodes, which chronicle the post-college life of Hannah Horvath (played by Dunham) and her cool and quirky twenty-something friends.

Once again, I’m wishing time away in anticipation of the start of Season Two this Sunday night at 9 Eastern Time on HBO.  If you haven’t seen it, I encourage you to check it out — especially if, like me, you have children in that age range.  My colleague Lorrie Lynch, the mom of a 23-year-old daughter, and I will be blogging about the show every week throughout the season.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here are five reasons we think you should tune in:

° It’s a window into the world of our kids. In the first episode, Hannah begged her parents (unsuccessfully) to continue supporting her so she could write her memoir. “I think that I may be the voice of my generation,” she told them. “Or at least a voice of a generation.”   Certainly, only a handful of millenials live the edgy lifestyle of the Brooklyn hipsters on the show.  But those women and their boyfriends seem to capture the universal experience of today’s young people who are stumbling toward adulthood at a time when the path isn’t very clear.  Or so say my kids. That’s enough of a reason to watch.

° It reminds you what it’s like to be 25. Society is vastly different today than in the early 1980s when I was that age, but the underlying feelings associated with crummy boyfriends, experimental wardrobes, unsatisfying sex, starter jobs, crowded parties and annoying roommates seem very much the same.  Suffice it to say that the unvarnished portrayal of this life stage will make you happy your twenties are in the rear view mirror.  Maybe being in fifty-something isn’t so bad after all!

°  It’s feels really groundbreaking.  Girls moves the needle forward when it comes to dealing with issues that may not seem appropriate for TV, even HBO. Watching the show last season, there were plenty of moments that made me cringe. Like the time when Hanna’s jerk of a boyfriend … oh, never mind. (If you’re curious, you can see the first season on demand. Nudity alert! And that’s mild.)  But as you watch, you will likely get the sense that the show is new and bold and different.  Cultural markers?  This feels like one.

° It’s as smart as it is funny.  Critics have called Dunham a “wunderkind,” and with good reason: Few young people even come close to success she achieved by age 25.  Some sour grapes suggest that’s because she and her fellow actors are well connected:  Dunham’s real-life parents are highly successful artists, and the cast includes Zosia Mamet (whose dad is playwright David Mamet) and Allison Williams (daughter of television newscaster Brian Williams.) But while those kinds of connections may open doors, if you don’t deliver the goods, it doesn’t matter who daddy is.  By my lights, Dunham has created a show that’s smart and insightful — and really, really funny.

° There’s a chance you will hate it.  For all the awards and acclaim the series has gotten, Girls has earned plenty of criticism too.  The blogosphere is filled with posts by Hannah-haters, and then there are those Twitter hashtags: #privilegedrichkids #spoiledbrats #getajob.  In a recent interview, Dunham warned: “If you hated what we were doing last season you will hate it even more.”  Love it or loathe it, Girls will elicit a reaction of some kind.  Personally, I don’t think anyone can watch the show and think, meh.

We’re eager to hear your impressions, and hope you will log back on every Monday morning and share your reaction with us.

More women running the show!

That seems to be the consensus of a bipartisan group of women U.S. Senators, interviewed earlier this week by ABC World News Anchor Diane Sawyer.

“I think if we were in charge of the Senate and of the Administration that we would have a budget deal by now,” Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine told Sawyer, as 18 of her colleagues nodded in agreement. “What I find is, with all due deference to our male colleagues, that women’s styles tend to be more collaborative.”

Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, agreed that women, by their nature, are “less confrontational and more collaborative … Not only do we want to work in a bipartisan way, we do it.”

Unfortunately, it’s still up to the guys to hammer out some kind of fiscal deal to prevent a big package of tax increases and spending cuts from taking effect next month.  Even though the 113^th Congress will have a record number of female Senators — 4 Republicans and 16 Democrats — when it convenes in January, that’s only a fifth of the total number. (“Whoop-di-do,” Gail Collins quipped in her New York Times column last week.)  And at this point, it looks like the poor fellows are still at an impasse.

But there’s clearly something to the notion that women can be more effective at getting things done. In a study published by the Harvard Business Review, women leaders beat out men when measured on such traits as collaboration, teamwork, results-oriented and championing change.

Of course there are dangers to any kind of gender stereotyping, and we all know of plenty exceptions to prove the rule. But with Washington in gridlock and just a couple of weeks to go before things get ugly, maybe it’s time to turn it over to the women in the House and Senate.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Photo: ABC News

Click here to view the embedded video.

Earlier this year, an op-ed piece in The New York Times underscored the same point. “Our research shows that the closer bonds between young adults and their parents should be celebrated, and do not necessarily compromise the independence of the next generation,” the social scientists wrote.

There’s no doubt about it: The boomerang phenomenon has been on the rise. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center last December, three in 10 parents of adult children (29 percent) report that the economy forced their grown child to move back in with them in the past few years. Adults age 25 to 34 are among the most likely to be living in multigenerational households.

And there’s been no shortage of advice to boomer parents on how to deal with the difficulties of their returning kids. But personally, I’m happy to see a little appreciation for the fact that generations can benefit by sharing a household. In cultures around the world, young people routinely live their their parents until they have families and homes of their own. And in some parts of the world, generations always share the same household as a matter of course.

Even here, the notion of kids going off to college never to return home was fairly unique to the boomer generation.

Just because we were fully independent early on doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the way it should be. Or that we should lament the fact that kids sometimes return to the nest.

JD with his maternal grandma.

In a situation when a parent decides not to be involved in a child’s life, what role (and what responsibility) do grandparents have?  A post by one of my favorite bloggers got me thinking about that question.

Christine Coppa has been sharing her life on the internet since shortly before her son was born about five years ago.  Her first blog, on glamour.com, was called “Knocked Up,” a title that appropriately captured her personal story: Chrissi was 26 and had a great job as a magazine editor in New York when she unexpectedly got pregnant by a boyfriend who had only been in her life a few months.

Long story short: The baby-daddy bailed … and the single mom started writing about the joys and challenges of being being pregnant, having an infant, dealing with a toddler, then a pre-schooler.  She’s written books, magazine articles and countless blog posts on all the issues that have come up while raising her son,  Jack Domenic, or JD as he’s affectionately known.

JD’s maternal grandparents have been a big part of her son’s life.  His paternal grandparents? Not so much.  In a recent post by Christine in Babble, she revealed that those grandparents haven’t had any role at all in JD’s life.

Christine Coppa with her son and her dad, also known as Poppy.

“They are standing by their son’s decision not to be involved. But they are also enabling and agreeing with it,” she writes. “It’s a gray area, not necessarily black or white. I get it. People act differently in situations.”

I agree that it definitely isn’t black or white — and as a mother, I certainly can understand the fierce instinct to be supportive of your child.  I’m not a grandma, so I can’t definitively speak to the attachment I suspect I’d feel to a grandchild.  But I kinda think I’d feel some sort of strong connection — and that I’d want to be involved.

Curious to hear what others think of this issue — especially grandparents whose grandchildren are in families where parents have split. What do you think of absentee grandparents? Are you one? Share your thoughts below in the comments.