Critics Still Snarky About 20-Something Women Making It Big in Television

NBC is adapting Emma Koenig’s — yes, she of the New York Times trend piece — Fuck! I’m In My 20s Tumblr and book into a television series. Perhaps you’ve heard of some other shows about 20-something ladies? No, not just Girls; Fox recently acquired Adulting, a J.J. Abrams-produced comedy based on Kelly Williams Brown’s equally uber-millennial blog and book, and there’s also CBS’ upcoming 20-Nothings, based on Lauren Bachelis’ Hollywood Assistants Tumblr.

Cue the “20-something women don’t deserve their own shows!” grumbling, although the A.V. Club is more patronizing than bitter:

Blogs and Tumblrs and Twitters-the status updates of the heart, the echo chambers of an era, the mirrors in which the parakeets of Generation Y Not Me? look at themselves and says, “Who’s a pretty, underappreciated birdy?”-are, of course, the TV shows of tomorrow. Particularly if these Tumblr-bloggy-Twitter things are created by twentysomething females who are just as adorably directionless, yet adorably savvy about being directionless, as Lena Dunham.

It would definitely be more than nice to see a different type (read: not white and/or haplessly bratty) of confused 20-something woman get her own show — that’s why we’re so thrilled that Awkward Black Girl’s Issa Rae is working on an ABC pilot — but shows about people struggling through stereotypical and relatively trifling life issues are nothing new, and they’re not only made by young women. So can we critique shows based on their specific content rather than grouping all 20-something women who’ve worked hard enough to land an impressive TV deal together? Because that’s pretty immature.

If you are a twentysomething female with a blog, you should be getting a TV show any day now [A.V. Club]