I finished the HBO show Camping last night, the latest effort from Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner. It was good but the fact that it’s not very long helped. Jennifer Garner plays a control freak married to David Tennant who is celebrating his forty-fifth birthday. They’re inviting their circle of similarly aged friends for a luxury camping trip.

Conflicts arise. Secrets are revealed. There’s a scene where the adults get drunk, far too drunk because they don’t get drunk in their normal adult lives. Also there’s a scene where the adults do drugs and everything goes to shit. Yeah, that’s a spoiler but you had to know it was coming, right? It always does in these shows.

Whenever I think about writing a pilot or a movie or something I always think of my own life first. I’d write characters like me and my friends. It’s where I go first. Clearly other people do. It’s how you get movies like The Anniversary Party, While We’re Young, and The Overnight and shows like Togetherness and a bunch of other shows about upper middle class white people, written by upper middle class white people poking fun at the peccadillos of upper middle class white people.

There are jokes about helicopter parenting and middle aged perfectly healthy adults feeling old. There’s a guy with a substance abuse problem that’s played for laughs. And, as alluded to above, the adults get drunk and high and relationships will never be the same.

I honestly think shows like this come from a new generational anxiety due to a relatively recent fluidity between adolescence and adulthood. Being an adult seemed so clear for earlier generations (I might be projecting). You married young, had children, had a lifelong job. You gave up all things childish. You wore a suit or a uniform to your job. You retired, hoped for grandchildren, and that would be it.

My generation brings their babies to bars. We’re in our forties and still play video games. We post to social media, saying, “Wanna feel old?” probably because we don’t, not as old as we should, anyway. Perhaps it’s a recent phenomenon to have our past so thoroughly documented and entered into public consciousness. Pulp Fiction still feels recent but, wait, shit, that’s 23 years old? Jesus…

Anyway, Brett Gellman and Ione Skye are great. Juliette Lewis is really great.

So, like I said, I recommend it but sometimes I wish we could see adults just being okay being their age, not wishing for something else, not trying to recapture anything. Hell, I’m in my forties. I kind of like it.