At some point during my suburban youth, I read a quip in a local paper about a guy from a small Midwestern town who visited New York and, seeing the swarms of people on the streets, asked, “Doesn’t anybody here work for a living?” May the great sociologist Richard Sennett forgive me for citing his 1970 book, “The Uses of Disorder,” —in which he writes in praise of “dense, disorderly, overwhelming cities” and adds, “The jungle of the city, its vastness and loneliness, has a positive human value.” This is an apt way to think about “Girls,” which premières this Sunday night, on HBO, and which is sparking an unfortunate amount of armchair sociology that’s getting in the way of understanding the actual inspirations and implications of the show.

Dunham is dramatizing her need to create as well as her sense that the ability to do so depends on the distinctive pressures and possibilities, liberties and constraints, that arise from life in a big and roiling city. Her story turns on the paradox of wanting access to power afforded by a city that’s the cultural capital of the moment while simultaneously desiring connection with a critical mass of people in situations similar to her own. She’s hungry for experience, both professional and intimate, and will endure pain to get it; she wants to turn that experience into the stuff of art—art that she’ll make virtually on the wing. Her disorder is creative; her lack of doubt about her own creative power is built on the constant bewilderment that she endures in trying to realize it. She offers a portrait of the artist as a young woman, and a good one at that. But this subject matter and her approach to it seem to have posed a problem for many critics.

Some of the critical sociology sparked by the show reflects surprisingly cloistered prejudices. At Salon, Rebecca Traister declares that “Girls” is evidence that “Marriage—while still widely fetishized as some kind of goal—is no longer the only acceptable marker of maturity” (stop the presses!!!). Katie Roiphe, at Slate, worries that Dunham’s depiction of unpleasant sexual experiences is “an old-fashioned moralism very sleekly packaged for a new age”—as if the world would have no idea that sex could be fun unless they heard it from Lena Dunham. What’s interesting is that Dunham acknowledges that certain things aren’t fun, but are serious experiences worth pursuing nonetheless. That comes up in her discussion with Frank Bruni, who, in an op-ed column in the Times, opines ruefully about the show’s presentation of women frustrated by relationships with porn-saturated men. But at his blog, he quotes Dunham saying that, for all the trouble of an unsatisfying relationship,

her character, smitten with the young man in bed with her, “is in the place she wants to be more than anywhere. She waits for his calls constantly.”

Writing at Salon, Irin Carmon complains that Dunham’s movie “Tiny Furniture” focusses on “elite woes” that are “emotionally destabilizing but ultimately transient.” She may be comforted to think so, but most people know enough stories of human train wrecks that are the result of emotional problems faced by young people, even ones born to money, to shake that confidence. And Nona Willis Aronowitz, at Good, claps the show’s merits to a numerus clausus: “If networks allowed more directors and screenwriters to strip away the gloss and reveal the nuance and rawness of young women’s experience, we’d have room for both ‘Girls’ and its less privileged, less white, less New York counterparts.”

I’m all for diversity of experience in shows and movies, but what makes Dunham’s experiences prominent and significant isn’t their glosslessness or nuance or rawness, it’s her self-consciousness about how to give them form—the recognition that her subject is the part of her life that involves the making of the show. She’s not investigating her class or group, nor is she revealing herself with a sense of self-justification or apology. Rather, she is living with imagination and imagining as she lives. People of all ethnicities and social strata live interesting lives, but few have a developed aesthetic imagination—and even fewer have one that’s so sharply crystallized at such a young age.

So why the sociology? Maybe, in part, because of the title. I’m reminded of the story behind the release of one of Jean-Luc Godard’s most remarkable and least-heralded films, “A Married Woman” (“Une Femme Mariée”), from 1964. Its protagonist (played by Macha Méril) is a married woman who is having an adulterous affair. Godard’s original title for the film was “La Femme Mariée” (“The Married Woman”), but French censors demanded that it be changed so as not to convey the impression that adultery is a characteristic of all married French women. Funny, but true; maybe if the show were titled “Those Girls” or (with apologies to the Stones) “Some Girls” or “The Lena Dunham Show,” attention would (appropriately) be set on the desire to create, the desire to succeed, the desire to live, the desire to (in a particular, decisive way) exist. Or maybe the problem is an intrinsic property of television, which puts a seriocomic series on the same footing as breaking news, political talk shows, and ball games, making them seem like a live feed from the outside world.

In any case, the creation of artistic products is intrinsically an “elite woe,” regardless of the financial status of the artist; priests and poets and painters are all members of the idle class (see Plato’s “Republic,” Book Two, on the creation of the “luxurious State”). At the same time, form reflects circumstances. I remember the early days of hip-hop—I had the sense that a new form was arising to express experiences that weren’t yet widely depicted, and that its aesthetic characteristics were integral to this communciation. And those experiences, in that form, proved to have a worldwide, quasi-universal power. I have no doubt that other young artists from other backgrounds will do as much in the cinema—whether movies or (I add optimistically) television. It isn’t a question of networks or gloss, but of sensibilities that arise as a blissful accident of nature. And that, above all, is what sharpens the critical scalpels of those who write about Dunham: envy.

Photograph by Jojo Whilden/HBO.