Girls, the HBO show that stole the zeitgeist in the early Instagram era and made Lena Dunham a generational star, is returning for a five-episode revival series. The project was announced via a mock video call with some of the original cast: Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke, Zosia Mamet and Andrew Rannells. They’re all returning for the reboot, which will pick up the story 10 years after the 2017 finale.
Girls captured such a specific era when it premiered in 2012. Social media still felt new and exciting, Barack Obama was president and so-called “woke 1” felt like it was going to be the new normal. The show’s characters navigated that terrifying twentysomething period when you’re searching for an identity, where it feels like everyone has it figured out but you.
Dunham’s realistic approach to sex scenes – sticky, awkward, unflinching – made the show one of the first to be “discoursed” on social media, spawning endless think-pieces and Twitter threads. She was declared the voice of her generation, but she also became a figure of controversy who didn’t always seem suited to such intense, era-defining fame. For Dunham, the Girls revival comes at a time where she’s taking a victory lap.
Following a string of successful TV projects and the release of Famesick – her New York Times best-selling memoir, which lifted the lid on her time filming Girls while living with chronic pain – she is in the ascendency once again. But given that reboots tend to have, ahem, a mixed success rate, the big question is: can Lena’s lightning strike twice? As a dyed-in-the-wool millennial who came of age on a cultural diet of Glee, unironic #hashtags and BuzzFeed quizzes, Girls really was my generation’s answer to Sex and the City.
The shows similarly star four white women navigating life in New York, and the characters are rendered with such specificity and consistency that fans can endlessly argue about whether they’re “a Hannah” or “a Carrie”. (I’m a Miranda in SATC, and a Marnie in Girls.) The news that Girls is returning draws inevitable comparisons with And Just Like That, the post-Covid reboot that took us back into Carrie Bradshaw’s world in her 50s. Over three toe-curling seasons, AJLT became a case study in how not to do a reboot. The show lost so much of the original’s astute, biting cynicism and often seemed more concerned with atoning for its past, such as its glaring lack of diversity and a handful of offensive “early 2000s” storylines that aged poorly.
Some of the characters – especially Miranda Hobbes, whose snarky realism was a vital leveller to Carrie’s delusional romanticism – were changed beyond recognition. Personally, I wouldn’t be against a Che Diaz cameo in Girls 2.0, but there’s a few factors that make it easier for Dunham to take her revival in a very different direction. Since Girls wrapped, she seems to have been in constant conversation with the characters.
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