Throughout “It’s A Shame About Ray,” characters tell other characters to “grow up,” either literally in those words or just in general. ‘Girls’ is a show about people who think that being grown up requires doing things a certain way—preparing pad Thai for your friends from scratch, getting married, having a house, moving on past a broken relationship—but they’re only starting to realize that nobody quite understands what being grown up means. It’s not an achievement you can unlock. It’s a thing you keep moving toward, until you’re old and perhaps experienced and realize just how little you knew back when… Being grown up means being perfectly self-aware, and that’s almost impossible to achieve.
Todd VanDerWerff, “It’s A Shame About Ray” review