Girlhood, deconstructed: Last year it was Barbie pink. This year it’s BRAT green. Join as we untangle the evolution of “girlhood.” (Yes, Simone Rocha sneakers, Girls reruns, and Sandy Liang’s pink ribbons included.)
To write for a living is to be told you’re a Carrie Bradshaw when, in actuality, you’re more of a Hannah Horvath. It is to learn that Carrie, a gay man’s late-’90s adaptation of a hetero woman’s dating column, was hyperbole. Fantasy. An out. Horvath, on the other hand, is an uncanny look inward. Even if you’ve never seen the portrait of a twentysomething that is Girls, you’ll surely have stumbled upon snippets or memes of it, fished from the ether it had briefly vanished into before enjoying something of a proverbial moment, seven years past its 2017 ending.
Maybe more than a moment, the spotlight currently on Girls illuminates for audiences new and old that the show got a lot more right than many of us would have liked to admit when it first made waves. After about a decade, a sudden surge in Gen Z superfans, and gigabytes worth of apologetic hot takes, it seems we’ve recovered from its crash landing into culture. With a better grasp of hybridized anthropology — and an appreciation for Adam Driver’s trajectory from icky, freaky boyfriend to hot rodent heartthrob — we can now finally delight, again or anew, in its legacy, and celebrate the infinitely wise piece of art that Girls has always been.
Girls preceded the self-mythologizing tendencies of the TikTok generation. “The way everybody behaves now is so Hannah-coded,” say Amelia Ritthaler and Evan Lazarus, hosts of the HBO Girls Rewatch podcast. “If she had a TikTok, it’d be like everybody else’s, but back then, she was the only one brave enough to be so annoying.” The contemporary’s “obsession with individuality, and all our own neuroses” helped birth, since, an entire cohort of slightly narcissistic Hannahs, each and every one of whom thinks they are the center of the universe. Or at least a center. Of a universe.
Girls’ astutely timed resurgence is precursor and symptom of all that we love to hate and hate to love today: Influencers becoming essayists. Memes becoming ads. Duolingo’s comment section antics. To cancel or be canceled. It’s people filming themselves as they melancholically traipse through the rain, ugly-cry over job struggles, or treat an unflattering skin condition. It’s mining Taylor Swift’s music for confessional metaphors, and lamenting Dua Lipa’s for its lack of lore. It’s asking what to replace the beans in a viral bean soup with because you don’t like beans.
But I digress.
If you used to have Tumblr and have since migrated to TikTok; if you’re not an overpaid newspaper columnist, but type away at advertorials so devoid of personality they might as well have been press releases; if you’re dating someone without a bed frame, rather than a millionaire; if you have been called a narcissist by a drunkenly honest friend and told they have yet to meet someone else, besides you, “who thinks their own life is so fucking fascinating,” chances are you are me, and I am Hannah, and all our lives are actually just mumblecore screenplays begging to be developed by HBO — the apparent blueprint of which I’m here to talk about, in the wake of its renaissance.
How’d We Get Here? A Roadmap
Pitched as an exploration of the period between when Gossip Girl wraps up and Sex and the City commences, Girls, 23-year-old Lena Dunham’s brainchild, would rattle the Hollywood cage when it premiered in 2012. Over the course of six seasons and 62 episodes, it documented Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, and Shoshanna adrift in post-college, parentally defunded, pre-shit-together limbo — with all the drugs, STDs, and dancing on one’s own that implies.
Lauded for accurate accounts of angsty early adulthood mayhem, but loathed for them just the same, some congratulated Girls for functioning as a “bold defense (and a searing critique) of the so-called Millennial Generation,” a “sly, brazen, graphic comedy,” and a “retort to a culture that pathologizes feminine adventure.” Others dismissed it as an allegedly unfeminist portrayal of “four entirely self-interested young women…having the most depressing, disempowered sexual relationships imaginable.”
Yes, and?
Leading the charge in the public cultural reappraisal of Girls are aforementioned comedians Ritthaler and Lazarus. When we meet over Zoom, they’re mid-rollout of their final installments, recapping the show’s last season, after launching in March of 2023. By chance or by fate, the two roommates had just finished a rewatch themselves when they picked up on an undercurrent of topical Twitter exchanges that led them to conceive of a weekly, episode-for-episode retrospect: “If Brooklyn’s into it, the rest of the world’s about to be,” Ritthaler remembers of the inkling that sparked their idea’s ignition; an oracle-befitting, quintessentially zillennial bedroom backdrop behind them, with a poster of Olivia Rodrigo to their left and a framed vinyl of Florence & The Machine’s Lungs to their right.
Parlaying intuition and momentum with promotional social media posts of subtitled stills and reels, as well as prolific co-hosts like cast member Zosia Mamet or showrunner Judd Apatow's daughter Iris, and an accompanying live act, their prediction held true: Upward of 100,000 followers across platforms lap up their thoughts on Girls, counting well over 3 million hearts of approval on TikTok alone.
Audience demographics are twofold: Thirtysomethings who’d witnessed and “remember so viscerally” the show’s original run; and “23-year-old white girls” watching for the first time, who hadn’t been introduced prior, too young to have followed while it aired. “Millennials are looking back with a gentler eye,” note the podcasters. “So many [of our guests], often blogger, writer, Twitter types, have brought up that they hated it because it was too close to their own life. They’re like, ‘When I first watched this in my early twenties, I felt personally attacked, and I couldn’t recognize what good a show it was because it just felt too much like it was making fun of me.’ Now, in their thirties, they can admit ‘I was a wreck, Hannah’s a wreck, I love these girls, I love that they’re me.’”
Autofiction: When Plot Is Life’s Plight
Apropos of a softened gaze, hindsight really is a gift. Or a key, rather, to savoring a series that was once as scandalous for what it depicted as it was for the captain steering its ship. “When we started this, we went in from a vantage point of ‘Lena’s so problematic, and the show’s so problematic — oh, oh!’” Ritthaler shares, referring to the many controversies surrounding Dunham during Girls’ run. I’m not about to rehash any of them specifically, though rest assured, she’s said and done some regrettable things. What I will touch on, however, is that her ascent coincided with the wider public’s seize of social media — a muscle we now know better to train, and put to task differently, than we did 10 years ago.
Dunham’s online presence more closely resembled that of a diaristic internet user, much more personable and unfiltered than the average celebrity’s. Akin to Hannah’s self-assessment (“I give zero fucks about anything, yet I have a strong opinion about everything, even topics I’m not informed about”), an impassioned twentysomething-year-old Dunham, too, might’ve sometimes spoken too quickly, too loudly, too uninformed on behalf of themes or folks she had no authority over. A hypothesis underpinned not just by numerous Notes app apologies thereafter, but by the sheer nature of average twentysomething year olds.
I would know, I’m one of them.
A core dilemma to have plagued Girls can be traced back to the blurring of lines of where Hannah ended and Dunham began. Sometimes, to her detriment, people would conflate her purposefully divisive, intentionally insufferable character with her private persona, and deduce the latter’s values, maturity, and intelligence from the former’s fictional context — vis-à-vis doing a Black Republican, a married doctor, or coke to meet a deadline. This isn’t to relativize it, or claim the backlash Dunham received was unwarranted. Rather, it should speak to how the unlikeability of Hannah was factored into a baseline distaste for Dunham herself; her politics, her appearance, her refusal to pander to industry standards, and the polarizing success that ensued because of it.
While today’s consensus is that Dunham needed never to be a narrator of the BIPOC experience, the show’s tension with race and class issues embodied the above quite well: “They say ‘write what you know.’ Well, maybe we shouldn’t have left it up to Dunham then to write those stories, because she knows better how to tell stories of privileged white women,” Ritthaler reflects. It’s been acknowledged, collectively, how disingenuous and “inorganic” it would’ve read — and does read elsewhere on TV today, when diversity efforts equal a peripheral box ticked rather than entrusting minority storytellers with platforms to call their own. “It was satire,” Lazarus concludes. “All these girls went to Oberlin — of course they’re white. That’s the joke.”
A joke Gen Z seems in on, right off the bat, having come of age in times “when selfishness and an indulgence in it are celebrated on social media.”
Never billed as autobiographical, per se, Dunham’s memoir does suggest plenty of its plotlines stem from real-life events — her own, a loved one’s, a colleague’s. This device Dunham has openly, capably wielded, but it’s not exclusive to her, nor is it isolated to Girls. “You’ll watch shows born after it, like Fleabag or Insecure — all of these are very much informed by their creators’ personal lives,” the podcasters remark. True. In similar vein, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s and Issa Rae’s respective projects borrowed, too, from the autofiction toolbox, to varying effect: Whereas the former has alluded to Fleabag being a younger her’s projection of a cynical, depressed, worst-case-scenario self, Rae, more straightforwardly, could be bothered only to change her heroine’s last name. Each with their own magnitude, the Lenas and the Hannahs, the Phoebes and the Fleabags, the Issas and the Issas, all represent that earthquake of when the tectonic plates of fantasy, self-mythology, and IRL behavior knock into one another. They shake us, because “the most resonant stories,” however formatted or packaged, whomever by, Ritthaler and Lazarus agree, “build on the truth.” Even, or especially, “when it’s weird and awful and random.”
Girls Is TikTok
“Not to be all, like, ‘death of the celebrity’ about it, but the internet has democratized being the main character,” declares Lazarus. In its commodification of authenticity, “it has incentivized a life so plot-driven we might end up the ones others can’t get enough of. Everybody just wants to make a career of being themselves.” Each individual profile’s algorithm then renders whatever distinction is left between subjective and objective truth almost meaningless. Creator, creation, and consumer are now conjoined, but unhinged from all and any sense of formality, distance, or properness.
Think about it: “You see a Get Ready With Me of someone going on about the most niche or grossest thing, and they might’ve been like, ‘Oh god, what if nobody else thinks this?,’ and then it goes viral and gets a million likes.” Why? Because “individual specificity is really fascinating and funny,” Lazarus says. Girls is like that, too, in that “it’s so relatable, even though it’s at times insane. As if all the insecurities in your head were finally voiced.” Aloud. In dire detail.
Girls in the context of all in which [they] live and what came before [them]
A guide, surely, but Sex and the City’s structure made for more traditionally escapist television — no less because it was Darren Star’s fictionalized exaggeration of Candace Bushnell’s weekly recounts of dating in Manhattan, televised from 1998 to 2004. Empowering, hilarious, smart, radical — and yes, relatable, too, even still, in its fundamental sentiments. But the characters’ affluence set the scene for how and where their adventures unfold, so that even the most ridiculing, aggravating, or heartbreaking moments onscreen are veiled in a near-bizarre glamor most viewers are far removed from, and thereby, I posit, more at ease with.
Girls, however, is much bleaker. It makes painfully clear that finding a footing is neither effortless nor lucrative. It enters at a stage when you’ve “just graduated, haven’t done anything cool yet, and are actually just wasting your parents’ money.” It misses all the aesthetic buffers, the pretty padding that disguised even the worst of Carrie and the gang’s situations as somehow aspirational.
Spoiler alert, but in Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, and Shoshanna’s lives — upper-middle-class ones, at that — there is relatively little to aspire to or root for. There’s not a funny one, or a righteous or a promiscuous or a whimsical one, or any other templated fragment of a personality you and your pals most wish to identify with — just “a bunch of fucking whiny nothings,” as Shoshanna puts it in her infamous season three rant, which someone on YouTube interpreted was her breaking the fourth wall and “[turning] into the average viewer of the show.”
“They’re all very flawed individuals, none of them perceivable as good people, just four friends that are completely broken,” says Lazarus. They’re independently in the “thick of not having anything figured out,” trying to join together and, more importantly, stick together, but can’t. Not always, and maybe not forever.
An Ode to Messiness
Whether or not you watched it in its initial broadcast and have returned to it later (more mature), have just recently lost your Girls virginity, or are yet to, you’ll likely find it’s less of a comfort watch and more of a horror mirror. Girls is the tragicomedic banality of how unbearable we, and the dynamics of our platonic, romantic, familial, and work relationships, can sometimes get; it’s a reflection of wanting to be a good person but also wanting the good things in life; diffusing between states of grand-scheme well-offness and the undoing of a food chain one is neither atop nor at the bottom of.
Its most compelling treat leaves at once behind its nastiest flavor, which is that the women of Girls never attain the redeeming, happy ending one had hoped for them — or for oneself, for that matter, left yearning for the relief we’ve grown accustomed to by products like it. Contrary to what Hannah and the rest think they are owed — and, by virtue, what we think we are owed — stuff just so happens to happen, or not, without any discernible causality in why it unravels as it does, awkward and arbitrary, without explanation, closure, or an immediate lesson to be learned from it. No butterfly wings, no tornados.
The sobering humor that nestles within such honest, unsexy chaos is at fault for Girls’ second coming. To Ritthaler and Lazarus, it’s an ode to messiness, a “PSA on bad behavior,” and recognizing “there’s not always going to be an answer to everything” — neither in reality nor in fiction.
Suspension of disbelief? Honey, what’s not to believe? I believe it. I’ve lived it. I still do. All of us, to some extent, no? It’s why “every spec script in circulation is an iteration of this exact show, but with the author’s own friend group.” Indeed, “30-year-olds today are still trying to write Girls.”
I would know, I’m one of them.
