What I’m Watching: Girls

Girls: Season 4, Episode 8 “Tad and Loreen and Avi and Shanaz” (B+)

It’s always a treat when characters who aren’t usually central to the storyline get to take the spotlight and earn a plotline all their own. We’ve seen Hannah’s parents many times before, at best obliviously ignoring the needs of their daughter and at worst contributing directly to her depression by insulting whatever she might have seen as even a meager accomplishment. In this episode, whose title spoofs the 1969 Oscar-nominated “Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice,” Hannah’s father Tad decides that he’s not comfortable being just a subplot anymore, and feels the need to come out after so many years in the closet. Loreen was decidedly not pleased, though her main anger was due to the fact that he was choosing to come out just after a big milestone in her life. Hannah does have to be the center of attention in some fashion, of course, and therefore she gets to hear the news from her overeager mother who wants to spread the pain and annoyance of what she’s just learned to someone else. I’m enjoying the budding relationship between Shoshanna and Jason Ritter’s Fran, and I think it might even be able to work out as long as Shoshanna doesn’t become too obsessed about Ray, positively or negatively, while helping him campaign and hearing him talk about Marnie as the ideal mate rather than her. Marnie getting proposed to is a big deal, but there was something very lackluster about how it happened that I think foretells inevitable doom for that romance.