The HBO com­e­dy Girls has been hailed as the fem­i­nist answer to Judd Apatow’s Hol­ly­wood bro­mance fran­chise. And like Apatow’s Knocked Up, The 40-Year-Old Vir­gin and Super­bad, Girls is a labored, exten­sive study in arrest­ed devel­op­ment, as expe­ri­enced by char­ac­ters ren­dered as fleet­ing glyphs of self-know­ing social priv­i­lege. Apa­tow has exec­u­tive-pro­duced Girls for HBO, and boy, is it easy to see why.

The only thing interesting about Girls is that it clarifies how much of American pop culture teems with similar regression-lite themes.

As in Apa­tow-land, the char­ac­ters who under­go the rote plot rever­sals and drugged-out hijinks in Girls – call it regres­sion lite – either hail from upper-mid­dle-class com­fort or mys­te­ri­ous­ly sus­tain them­selves on some mag­i­cal com­bi­na­tion of pluck and attitude.

The show’s cre­ator and writer, Lena Dun­ham, also plays the lead pro­tag­o­nist, Han­nah. After Han­nah learns that her two col­lege-prof par­ents will no longer sub­si­dize her bohemi­an life and she los­es an unpaid intern­ship at a lit­er­ary mag­a­zine, a cri­sis ensues. So nat­u­ral­ly, she adjourns to the apart­ment of her actor-boyfriend – who fan­ci­ful­ly sub­sists on an $800-a-month stipend from his grand­moth­er and the afore­men­tioned pluck – for vague­ly self-hat­ing rough sex. When she wor­ries that she pos­sess­es none of the tal­ents that one is sup­posed to tout in one’s résumé, the indif­fer­ent swain announces that it’s been so long since he’s looked for a job that he can’t remem­ber what you’re sup­posed to include in a résumé.

As the kids say: What­ev­er. Through Girls’ turgid intrigues, inter­change­ably wan char­ac­ters wan­der from jobs, boyfriends and glam­orous trav­el des­ti­na­tions, mar­veling at the world’s fail­ure to con­form to their desires. Not that they have much grasp on what those desires are: Han­nah is work­ing, desul­to­ri­ly, on a mem­oir – with the baroque Dave Eggers-style self-know­ing dis­claimers that go with such a twen­tysome­thing con­ceit. And in a chem­i­cal­ly fueled dis­play of still more pluck, she bran­dish­es the work in progress before her par­ents and demands a year-long stipend from them to com­plete the manuscript.

The only thing inter­est­ing about Girls is that it clar­i­fies how much of Amer­i­can pop cul­ture teems with sim­i­lar regres­sion-lite themes. The HBO com­e­dy Veep sets up a pha­lanx of mid­dle-school style vitu­per­a­tion with­in the fic­tion­al vice pres­i­den­cy of Seli­na Mey­er (Julia Louis-Drey­fus). Drey­fus’ Seli­na is a (notion­al­ly) grown-up and suc­cess­ful ver­sion of Dunham’s Han­nah, fret­ting over recon­dite slights to lob­by­ists and how well she’s trend­ing on Twit­ter, all pret­ty much in a vac­u­um of actu­al, you know, polit­i­cal ideas or mean­ing­ful con­flict. Arman­do Ian­nuc­ci, who direct­ed the 2009 black com­e­dy sat­i­riz­ing the run-up to the Iraq War, In the Loop, has clear­ly cal­cu­lat­ed that the scabrous Machi­avel­lian con­flicts that drove that more suc­cess­ful project won’t fly for an Amer­i­can audience.

And why shouldn’t he? From the antics of the emo­tion­al­ly stunt­ed ad men of Mad Men to the faux-whim­si­cal child wor­ship on dis­play in Extreme­ly Loud and Incred­i­bly Close, tragedies are hewn from the wrench­ing com­pro­mis­es and cru­el­ly delayed grat­i­fi­ca­tion that attend the onset of adult responsibility.

Iron­i­cal­ly, the one pop cul­ture fable that bears wit­ness to tra­di­tion­al adult virtues – an appre­ci­a­tion for the rig­ors of man­u­al work, a dis­trust of easy fame and celebri­ty and a demand­ing eth­ic of care for oth­er, weak­er souls – is aimed square­ly at teens. Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, adapt­ed into a block­buster movie fran­chise, depicts the world of adult social pow­er as an unre­lieved dystopia, ren­der­ing vir­tu­al­ly every adult char­ac­ter as fool­ish, ruth­less and/​or infan­tile. The novel’s pro­tag­o­nist, the omni­com­pe­tent teen war­rior Kat­niss Everdeen, reflects thus­ly on her cling­ing, inef­fec­tu­al moth­er: ​“Some small gnarled place inside of me hat­ed her for her weak­ness, for her neglect.” And when one of her adult han­dlers guess­es at her con­tempt, she thinks: ​“He’s right… The whole rot­ten lot of them is despicable.”

Dur­ing the indus­tri­al-age hey­day of the Vic­to­ri­an nov­el, a char­ac­ter like Kat­niss would be a fig­ure of pathos – a child forced to grow up pre­ma­ture­ly and pro­vide for her hard-pressed fam­i­ly. But in our own ter­mi­nal­ly regressed pop cul­tur­al land­scape, she’s noth­ing less than a super­hero. Small won­der that she goes on to become a revolutionary.