HBO’s Girls Goes on Trial in the Court of Gen Z

By Alexandra Cohen 

In 2017, when I was 14, I watched my mother watch a naked Lena Dunham on the series finale of HBO’s Girls. I hadn’t been allowed to watch many of the shows that my parents did, and sneaking a peak at Dunham’s boobs helped me understand why. 

Now, nobody tells me what I’m allowed to watch — I have all the freedom in the world and that freedom brought me to hbomax.com and a summer long binge of Girls. But I wasn’t the only one watching; everyone around me seemed to be watching a TV show that ended over half a  decade ago. With access to streaming and each other, we experienced a unique culture where the binge and the rewatch are just as culturally significant as the weekly premiers of new episodes. 

A friend of mine started watching Girls because people were talking about it on Twitter. Then, another friend hurried over to HBO Max, after he saw a TikTok of a scene in the show. Soon, everyone was watching it. Comedian Lane Moore, who was only in one episode of the show, received a check for $6.50 because of the resurgence of people now watching the show. 

A new group of twenty-somethings, much like the four titular Girls of the show, found themselves immersed in the world that Dunham and Apatow brought us. Yet, as much as we were drawn in by the mistakes that Hannah Horvath made, we couldn’t help but look at her with a more critical eye than the watchers of the initial run of the show. Even they critiqued the show’s overbearing whiteness and the specific group of people it highlighted. It’s satire, that was always true; but how are we supposed to look at a show created by a woman, who despite making such quality entertainment, continues to make headlines for the wrong reasons? 

Lena Dunham’s Wikipedia “Controversies” section is the biggest one on her page. She is not to be idolized; and yet it’s damn near impossible to separate the art from the artist when she wrote, directed, produced and starred in the series. Her sins cannot be forgiven: she created a show with an all-white cast, she’s defended countless incidents of sexual assault, and made tons of insensitive comments about issues that need to be handled with by the right person in the right demographic with the right care — more times than not, that person is not Lena Dunham. She’s in the wrong in so many ways, but wasn’t that what Girls was all about? 

Girls is a show about the worst people with the best circumstances who believe that they’re the best people with the worst circumstances. They believe that nobody is more progressive minded and tolerant than them, that being a struggling writer is the worst lot in life, and that getting cut off from your wealthy parents is a fate worse than death. The concept itself is satirical. She points at a community that she knew — her friends from liberal arts college and an upbringing in Brooklyn private schools. 

Evan Lazarus, one of the hosts of the HBO Girls Rewatch Podcast said, “It’s such a story of her existence, but also her existence is problematic in that sense.” And it’s true, she was promoting an existence of gentrification and a fake sense of wokeism — but that existence was true of her and her community. Lazarus co-hosts a podcast with fellow Brooklyn comedian Amelia Ritthaler, and while they praise the writing of the show and the entertainment value, they also have an entire segment of each episode about how the show holds up today — and a lot of the time it doesn’t. 

People who watched the show at the time weren’t itching to put their natural bodies in front of a screen and walk around Brooklyn covered in cum, yet today’s young people are more down with that. Ritthaler said, “I feel like people in her generation wouldn’t want to be seen as her, whereas like people now are like I’m actually OK being that way.” 

Our generation grew into a special kind of narcissism that Lena Dunham pioneered. She made autofiction into a genre that Judd Apatow might pick up and produce. We all believe our stories are important and need to be heard — even when they’re about a white girl living in Brooklyn who gets cut off from her parents. Still, perhaps her narrative wasn’t the one that needed to be shared then; instead, maybe we can learn from revisiting it now.

Dunham was maybe smarter than us all: she wrote a satire about herself and her world and marketed it as an HBO comedy series. A 2023 audience in a post-covid world has the knowledge to watch this show and look at it with a critical eye, more so than the commentators of its original run. We can appreciate what Dunham did by putting real bodies on TV before it was cool. We can condemn the whiteness of the show and the political incorrectness of Hannah’s pretend-politically correct world. We shouldn’t have expected Lena Dunham to write as good of a show about a world which she did not know— there are so many other voices who can and should do that. She wrote what she knew and she did so successfully. 

At the end of the day, I like Girls. I think that it’s smart and funny and Dunham is a hell of a good writer, especially considering that she was just 23 years old when she sold the show to HBO. I watched it in my first New York apartment and laughed and cried and saw myself — for better or for worse — in all of the Girls (except Jessa because nobody who’s watching Girls is a Jessa). The generation before us had Sex and the City. They could be a Carrie, or a Miranda, or a Samantha, or a Charlotte; sure each character had their flaws and quirks, but they were all putting on designer shoes and trotting around Manhattan looking fabulous. Nobody wants to be the characters from Girls. Each one is more narcissistic than the next and trotting around Brooklyn in sweaty TJ Maxx, but they are the heightened versions of us all. 

Dunham and the show itself are problematic, that is absolutely true. Still, Girls showcases a world where what we deem problematic now was progressive less than ten years ago. As we rewatch Girls in community, we can use it as a lesson in how far we’ve come and celebrate the writing and entertainment value while also criticizing the show’s many wrongdoings. When equipped with the judgment and the knowledge we have today, we can look back at Girls and still enjoy it, but we must do so with a careful eye and a little bit of caution.