Girls is coming back and, according to Variety, this is a “shocker”. I speak fluent journalese: “shocker” is code for “guys, an exclusive would have been nice”.
The return of Lena Dunham’s show for a five-episode series on HBO in 2027, a decade after its grim finale, isn’t all that surprising. The skies above the entertainment industry are crowded with boomerangs. Everything comes back around eventually, even that show from your youth that you steadily drifted away from, have some residual affection for but now firmly associate with a different time in your life.
It could be a coincidence that HBO, also the outlet behind the original 2012-17 run, was only recently a pawn in the Hollywood megatransaction that saw Paramount Skydance complete a $110 billion (€98 billion) takeover of HBO’s previous parent, Warner Bros Discovery.
But these deals don’t happen without generating a whole new suite of executives who enjoy conjuring up targets for other executives, who are then incentivised to make as many noisy commissions as they can.
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Girls is one such noisy commission. Some of us have only just stopped rolling our eyes at the takes it spawned in 2012 when, in its pilot episode, Hannah, the aspiring writer played by Dunham, suggested to her sceptical parents that she might be “the voice of my generation”, or at least “a voice of a generation”.
Dunham conceived Hannah as the walking manifestation of comic delusion. In this scene she’s trying to get her parents to reverse their decision to financially cut her off. She will say anything.
None of that humour survived the discourse that conflated Hannah with Dunham herself before tediously ruling it impossible for the creator of Girls to speak for all millennials – something she never claimed to do.
Famesick, Dunham’s 2025 memoir, did its bit to bring Girls back into the conversation, largely by detailing her negative experience of working with Adam Driver, who played her on-off boyfriend, and her professional break-up with her fellow showrunner, Jenni Konner.
Neither will be involved in the revival. But the central quartet of friends – Hannah, Marnie (Allison Williams), Jessa (Jemima Kirke) and Shoshanna/Shosh (Zosia Mamet) – will return, as will Hannah’s gay friend Elijah (Andrew Rannells), now promoted to Wee English Fella status as the token male in the main line-up.
With all of these cast members alive and available, a comeback was always more likely than not.
This is where I declare my indifference on the basis that I’m not a millennial. Girls is not that show from my youth. The six years it was on air did not overlap with any formative period in my life, and my memories of it have no temporal connection to similar experiences of my own.
I admired much of the series and am intrigued by this revival, but watching the travails of Hannah, Marnie, Jessa (my favourite) and Shosh didn’t have the potency for me that it seems to have done for a younger cohort: for millennial women, Girls wasn’t just a funny diversion; it was a mirror in which they could see an imperfect yet compelling reflection of their own desires, ambitions and frustrations.
This week’s news has therefore triggered a spectrum of reactions, from deep investment to nervous curiosity to the conviction that no good can come of it. Congratulations, you’re old now. Everything is bittersweet. The one consolation might well be that the legacy of Girls was already complicated by the dispiriting way in which it ground to a halt.
The penultimate episode was decent, if downbeat, with a pregnant Hannah concluding that New York City has brought her nothing but misery and Shosh announcing that she’s had enough of her self-absorbed friends. There was a sense of lives moving on in a way that was both realistic and dramatically satisfying.
The final episode, by contrast, was lifeless and moribund. Set in the social purgatory of upstate New York, its final minutes firmly equated Hannah’s newfound maturity with her motherhood, which is about as patriarchal a trope as you can get.
Viewers who made it through six seasons of messy, exciting, tumultuous girlhood were rewarded with a conclusion that linked the emotional capacity to be a selfless mother with successful breastfeeding. The revival, if nothing else, is a chance to obliterate that trite betrayal of an ending.
Some media narratives never die: only last year, while on the red carpet, Dunham had to explain all over again that “the voice of my generation” thing was a scripted joke. Hannah was just being awful, as she almost always was.
Indeed, the freedom for Hannah, Marnie, Jessa and Shoshanna to be awful was, and should remain, the glorious thing about Girls. They can be awful friends, mothers, daughters, wives and girlfriends, exes, colleagues, citizens, anything.
As long as they have the opportunity to be terrible human beings again, this show should be fine.
