The Week Ahead: Let’s Hear It For the Girls

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Jojo Whilden / HBO

Jemima Kirke, Lena Dunham, Zosia Mamet

Every Monday, for your planning purposes, we will lay out the week ahead in entertainment. (All times refer to EDT.)

Girls premieres Sunday at 10:30 pm on HBO

One of the year’s most eagerly anticipated and ubiquitously hyped new shows,  Girls — a product of Tiny Furniture‘s Lena Dunham — debuts this coming weekend. The cable comedy has been getting lots of attention not just for its provenance, with a creator who made a splash at film festivals in 2010 and an executive producer who is none other than Judd Apatow, but also for its non-glossy depiction of the lives of four young women living in New York City. The four “girls” have been subject to numerous comparisons to the Sex and the City quartet, but the differences between the two posses promise to be innumerable. For starters, Girls presents a more realistic vision of the lives of young people whose shoes are not Manolos, whose sexual foibles are not quite so graceful, whose relationship with money is a lot closer to the true experience of a flailing Brooklynites in their twenties. Even if that life is unfamiliar or unappealing (or if it hits a little too close to home), Girls will be the cultural event of the week that you’ll want to be able to talk about. Plus, TIME’s James Poniewozik says the hype is all deserved.

(READ: Brave New Girls)

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RIqj_ZgGN0]

And that’s not all. This week is a cross-media one for the ladies. We’ve got:

An Iron Lady

Meryl Streep’s Oscar-winning turn as Margaret Thatcher is out on DVD this Tuesday. If you missed it in the theaters, now’s your chance to check out her embodiment of the controversial British prime minister — and why the film also won an Academy Award for make-up.

An Unprintable Lady

The awkwardly titled Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23 (a phrase that either rhymes or sounds like something a person would say, but not both) premieres Wednesday at 9:30 p.m. on ABC. The comedy, about some zany roommates — à la other theme-appropriate television offerings New Girl and 2 Broke Girls — is notable because the “B” is friends with James Van Der Beek, played by James Van Der Beek, as a version of the version of himself made famous by Funny or Die.

An Under-represented Lady (Actually, Lots of Them)

Miss Representation, a documentary that takes on the startling lack of depictions of powerful women in American media, has been a bit hard to see outside festivals since its premiere at Sundance last year. That is, until Tuesday, when it will be out on DVD. We’ll have a Q&A with writer-director Jennifer Siebel Newsom.

A Natural Lady

Carole King’s new book, A Natural Woman: A Memoir, will be available Tuesday. That makes us feel (that makes us feel, that makes us feeeeeel!) like going to a bookstore.