The backlash started before this show began. 13 years later, it’s found its audience

In the very first scene of Girls, 24-year-old aspiring writer Hannah (series creator Lena Dunham) has just been financially cut off from her parents, so she brushes them off when they ask to see her the next day. “I have work,” she says pointedly, “and then I have a dinner thing, and then I am busy, trying to become who I am.”

It’s not as funny, or quoted as often, as “I think I may be the voice of my generation… or at least a voice of a generation”. But it works better as a mission statement for the show. The work of figuring yourself out is hard and takes time. And that might be why, 13 years after that episode aired, a new generation of viewers is appreciating the empathy for that process that’s baked into the show.

“One of the great phenomenons of 2023 so far has been everyone rewatching Girls,” declared Matt Rogers in March of that year on his hugely popular podcast with Bowen Yang, Las Culturistas. In recent years, multiple podcasts have popped up dedicated to watching the show – from The Girls Girls, where two 30-somethings reflect on how their understanding of the series has changed, to Girls Rewatch, where two Gen Z comedians discuss the show and its similarities to their own lives.

Andrew Rannells, who played Hannah’s ex-boyfriend Elijah, recently related with distaste an  interaction with a teenage fan who said, “It’s so cool to see what it was like to be young then”. And part of the appeal for younger and first-time viewers is that the show can already be experienced as a period piece. From Hannah’s “put-a-bird-on-it” thrift-store pattern clashing to awful married folk-music duos, it’s a better cultural time capsule than almost any of its peers.

The era has already been aestheticised and romanticised by people in their teens and 20s on social media – and who can blame them? Most of them spent several years of their early adulthood stuck inside, doing remote school or work and socialising through an increasingly enshittified internet where adventure is far harder to come by – you can’t accidentally smoke crack or steal a boat with your ex over Snapchat – and emerged into a world that is, overall, nastier and less hopeful than the one the early 2010s seemed to promise.

“I think Gen Z loves Girls because we’re not having sex, we’re not [making] friends, we’re not leaving the house,” Amelia Ritthaler, one of the hosts of Girls Rewatch, mused to Dunham in an interview last week. “And it’s so fun to watch a show where it was, like, right before we were so afraid to do everything.”

Louisa is a 29-year-old Australian musician who calls herself “a geriatric gen Z”, and watched the early seasons of Girls as a teenager, finding the characters “weird and annoying”. She says that both the subtlety of the satire and the discourse around the series’ creator overwhelmed the experience. “Hannah especially I found annoying, and a lot of that would have had to do with how Lena Dunham was being talked about in the culture at the time.”

The backlash had begun before Girls even premiered – how had this 25-year-old indie filmmaker with one feature under her belt locked down an HBO deal with Judd Apatow? We didn’t yet use the phrase “nepo baby”, but Dunham’s NYC-based artist parents sounded glamorous enough to have connections that made it possible. Once the show premiered it was like a shot of nitrous in the hot takes engine that fuelled online media – especially its unvarnished sex scenes, often featuring moments of discomfort and shots of Dunham’s very normal body that were not optimised to be titillating or “flattering”.

The show’s reputation also suffered from the conflation of Dunham’s character with Dunham herself. Hannah’s gracelessness dovetailed neatly with Dunham’s sometimes clumsy navigation of becoming a public figure.

I wrote about Girls regularly and when it came up in conversation people (usually women) would say “I just find them all so insufferable, especially her.” They would wince and squirm, the way I do about the exquisite but (for me) unwatchable cringe comedy of Curb Your Enthusiasm – a fictional show with a protagonist explicitly based on its actual creator that is nonetheless received as fiction.

In the years since the show’s sixth and final season ended in 2018, Dunham’s reputation as a particular kind of annoying, oblivious white woman had crystallised. A provocatively phrased story in her collection of essays about inappropriate play with her baby sibling Cyrus when she was a small child is behind the oft-repeated claims that she is a sexual abuser, despite Cyrus repeatedly denying any harm. More troubling was her full-throated defence of a Girls writer accused of assault, which Dunham later retracted and apologised for. But while Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner vanished from public life after being accused of sexual harassment (an accusation he has contested), it didn’t spark any soul-searching about whether his creation was still one of the greatest TV shows of all time.

All this is to say that despite the critical praise and 19 Emmy nominations, it still feels like Girls never had a chance to be received on its own merits.

Its current renaissance feels two-pronged: younger audiences watching for the first time as adults, and people in their 30s or older appreciating this wise, spiky coming-of-age story with the benefit of a little hindsight. For all that people say they want relatable content, seeing yourself in awkward, annoying characters is sometimes just too painful if you haven’t made peace with your own annoying awkwardness.

One of the major flashpoints of Gen Z’s obsession is Marnie Michaels, Hannah’s best friend (herself based on Dunham’s real-life BFF and #girlboss final boss, The Wing founder Audrey Gelman). Marnie is a put-together striver with perfect hair, a shiny foil for Hannah’s bush-out messiness, cursed with far more determination than self-awareness.

If you were playing Which Girls Girl Are You?, nobody wanted to be a Marnie. Actor Allison Williams recently theorised that audiences hated her character so much because it was “a really unflattering mirror – a lot of people were Marnies and didn’t want to admit it.” Much of the cringe was that she tried hard, and openly wanted things, and Williams says Gen Z viewers are reframing Marnie’s fussiness as self-care and self-knowledge on the path to the life she wants to lead.

“A lot of people don’t want to be seen becoming something,” Williams said. “They just wanna be it already.”

As the first generation to do a huge amount of our “becoming” online and thus in public, in ways we’re still reckoning with, millennials have been the butt of the joke online for a few years now – both snark-poisoned and too earnest, clinging to nostalgic media as we enter ungraceful middle age. But we’re also old enough to look at people in their 20s and younger with real tenderness, and forgive them their cringe because it is also ours.

“[Girls] captures a sense of earnestness that millennials had that Gen Z today feel too ashamed to engage in,” Louisa says. “Gen Z humour tends to have about five layers of irony, and they’re afraid of being cringe or being seen trying too hard – something none of the Girls characters are afraid of.”

Girls is streaming on HBO Max.

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