These 'Girls' offering anything but fun

I really need to keep up with my recommended dosages.

Still haven't gotten my flu shot for the virus that is ravaging the country. And I never drank the Kool-Aid that has made every TV critic in America fall madly, deeply in love with HBO's Girls.

Time's James Poniewozik hailed the series as "raw, audacious, nuanced and richly, often excruciatingly funny."

As I read one accolade after another about Girls, I honestly found myself wondering whether we were watching the same show.

Lena Dunham's comedy is launching into its second season this week, as buzzed-about and as sadly grotesque as ever.

The show focuses on four young friends (Dunham, Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke, and Zosia Mamet) in Brooklyn who are trying to find their place in the world, usually with disastrous results. (MTV's short-lived I Just Want My Pants Back covered this same ground far more amusingly.)

But as Dunham and company stagger about, looking for romance and gainful employ, all four seem as though they are playing dress-up. (Or rather dress-down, since Dunham's character, Hannah, seems to have acquired her wardrobe at the Patty Duke consignment shop.)

These girls don't know what they want. They don't know why they do the things they do. They're just trying to pile up experiences, hoping that it will make them feel alive.

Like Louie, another almost unwatchable show that is critically sainted, Girls takes a warts-is-all approach to comedy, ushering its characters through one depressing debacle after another.

Dunham is often applauded for her daring because of her enthusiastic embrace of unflattering situations, but it plays more like self-flagellation than fearlessness.

By the way, the media buzz about Girls hasn't been too persuasive. The show peaked last year with 1 million viewers. That's less than Luck, the Dustin Hoffman racetrack drama that HBO canceled with extreme prejudice. Then again, Girls is doubtless cheaper to produce because it's shot on sets that appear to have been left over from The Honeymooners.

As the second gauntlet begins, Hannah is still waiting hand and foot on Adam (Adam Driver) in his grotty apartment, as he recovers from getting hit by a truck. She even holds his bedpan, which is surprising since his only handicap is a leg cast.

It's hard to know how to refer to Adam. Convention would suggest either ex-lover or ex-boyfriend. But using either of those words would be a wild exaggeration of their relationship; Hannah and Adam bonded as deeply as two people stuck in an elevator together for an uncomfortable half hour.

The rancid, reflexive sex scenes (something this show specializes in) between them in Season One were more repulsive in their way than anything you'd ever see on The Walking Dead.

The primary knock on Girls in its first go-round was that the show was too white. So it's probably not surprising that 30 seconds into Sunday's debut, Hannah has her clothes off and is riding the just-introduced Sandy (Donald Glover of Community) like a jet ski in rough surf. ("See, I'm not racist. I'm having sweaty sex with a black man.")

But as Hannah carefully explains to him, she will not tolerate any emotional involvement between them because of her unbroken track record with "dementos, slugs, and weirdos."

That may be the most painful aspect of Girls: how little these young women are willing to settle for in their relationships, which are all degradation, no reward.

I found myself last year rooting for the crazily whirlwind pairing of Jessa (Kirke) and Thomas-John (Chris O'Dowd of The Crimson Petal and the White). That's because they were the only couple in Dunham's stultifying universe who showed a measure of affection for each other.

The happy couple return from their honeymoon on Sunday. You may be shocked to see how quickly the bloom is off that rose.

Marnie (Williams, the daughter of NBC news anchor Brian) is downsized (not fired) from her job at the art gallery and has to endure an uncomfortable lunch with her mother (guest star Rita Wilson), who won't stop bragging about her young lover, a "cater waiter."

Strange to say, but pendant pitchwoman Jane Seymour was far funnier than Wilson in a similar role this week on Fox's Ben and Kate.

The best part of the new season is the addition of The New Normal's Andrew Rannells as Elijah, Hannah's flighty but quippy gay roommate.

Rationalizing his relationship with a rather demented older lover with money, he says, "Maybe I just want to be Wendi Murdoch. Maybe that's my new thing."

Elijah may be confused, but he's got energy, which makes him sparkle in Dunham's broke, boho Brooklyn, where people lose interest in their own conversations. They actually bore themselves.

In an interview in the current Rolling Stone, filmmaker Judd Apatow, who executive-produces Girls, discusses Dunham's technique.

"We all understand how to make an audience deliriously happy," he says. "You want those moments, but you also want the audience to suffer sometimes."

Well, if that's the intent of Girls, then Dunham succeeds all too well with her emotionally bleak portrait of failed adulthood.

Bad sex, bad karaoke, sick personal attachments. Who could ask for anything more?