The Girls rewatch

Magdalene Taylor on Girls’ resurgence in popularity. This post was originally published in March 2023.

At a bar last week, I was having a conversation with two acquaintances when we came to the realization that we were each in the midst of a Girls re-watch. A month or so prior, I was added to a group chat titled “Lena Dunham Scholars.” At a dinner the week before, a quick comment on how I was revisiting the show was met with “Of course.” Of course we’re all rewatching Girls right now. Just look at the myriad tweets on your timeline about it, or the clips that appear on your TikTok feed. Maybe they’re recalling the overwhelming cringe of Marnie performing “Stronger” by Kanye West, or a video of a woman saying she’s making a “pilgrimage” to Greenpoint in honor of the show. Everyone is watching Girls. 

It’s been just over ten years since the show first aired, and less than six since its end. There is some sense of nostalgia driving this trend, to be sure, but not quite enough to explain it as a whole. Perhaps we’ve gotten ourselves to a safe distance from the constant discourse and sanctimonious blogs the show generated, and now we can adequately see it for what it was: a biting portrayal of New York, womanhood and friendship that we were never supposed to take too seriously.

As the show was first airing, it was seen as both bold and exasperating. Headlines at the time asked “Hannah Horvath, Why Do We (Still) Hate Thee So?” and “What the Hell Was HBO Thinking?” Reviews called it “courageous” and “brave” and “unstoppably irritating.” Much of what may have once been fearless about the show has since been absorbed into mainstream viewing. There still aren’t many topless bodies quite like Dunham’s on television, but maybe the drama (and drama there certainly was) of repeatedly seeing her breasts has worn off.

The Girls-era discussion of whether or not tv audiences could handle “unlikeable” female protagonists was often ahistorical and always myopic, but the endless talk did shift something—countless messy female protagonists have followed in Hannah Horvath’s wake, most of whom have been received much more warmly than the still-tendentious girls of Girls: consider Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer in Broad City; Issa Rae in Insecure; projects from Sharon Horgan, Mindy Kaling, and Pamela Adlon; Phoebe Waller-Bridge in Fleabag (a character who is often as annoying as Hannah, but much skinnier). And so we watch Girls now with a much deeper familiarity with imperfect women on television.

But what has struck me most in this current rewatch (my third) is how obviously satirical the entire show is. How could I have missed it before? For me, at least, I began watching the show in high school and finished it in college, a period in which the concept of being a writer in New York City in my mid-20s was purely aspirational. The life Girls presented to me was, somehow, so abstract that I could only assume that this was how things really looked. But not only was I wrong in my youthful interpretation of the show, much of the conversation surrounding the show skipped over the fact that it was a satire.

Dunham was clear from the start that Girls served in part to make fun of people in her milieu and her characters, but many reviews (like the ones above) took the show on its face. It wasn’t until the finale that writers en masse began to publish essays saying “wait, maybe we were wrong about this.” And now that I, too, am a writer in New York City, in my mid-20s, among the types that Dunham was parodying, I can see that I was actually right in my interpretation of the shows realism, but wrong in my interpretation of tone. People really are just as Lena Dunham showed them to be in Girls. That’s why it’s so funny. 

There was a paired loathing for the character of Hannah Horvath and Lena Dunham, who created and played her. Every annoying thing Horvath did was placed upon Dunham, and vice versa. Dunham’s many public blunders are worth critique, and Horvath is a pathologically selfish character. But they are different people, something audiences were somehow able to understand when watching Seinfeld yet incapable of comprehending when it came to Girls. But maybe now, with enough distance from a roaring Girls-centered news cycle, people can just appreciate the stinging sharpness of the show, and read it as a piece of entertainment rather than an endorsement. Dunham never said that her girls were meant to be good. They were meant to be interesting to watch.  

“To me, Lena Dunham and Girls are interesting right now because the expectations around and general approach to self-awareness are changing,” says Matt Van Ommeren, who leads a weekly Girls viewing and discussion in Williamsburg.  “I think a lot of people around me are questioning the purpose of a prevalent form of performative self-awareness and Girls has a lot to say about that both because the characters seem to be tragically unaware and because the process of creating Girls is a demonstration of Lena’s unique flavor of overtly performative self-criticism and self-awareness.” 

In other words, maybe it took some time and distance to appreciate that subtle brilliance of the show. What was once jarring is now refreshing. There’s a nostalgia element at play—it did, after all, premiere in 2012, and we still appear to be on a (cresting) indie sleaze wave. But maybe it just took the show some time to, as Hannah Horvath would say, become who it is. Or maybe we’re just finally able to enjoy it a bit more in the absence of a news cycle dictating what we should think about it. Who knows, though—if everyone is watching it, and I’m here writing about it now, aren’t we ushering in that era once again? 🗽

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