Girls is an American comedy-drama television series created by and starring Lena Dunham, executive-produced by Judd Apatow. The series depicts four young women living in New York City. The show's premise was drawn from Dunham's own life, as were major aspects of the main character, including financial isolation from her parents, becoming a writer, and making unfortunate decisions. The series is known for its commentary on postfeminism and conversation around body politics and female sexuality.
Lena Dunham created Girls with the intention of offering a more realistic and nuanced portrayal of the lives of young women in their twenties. The show, which premiered on HBO in 2012, revolved around a group of friends played by Dunham, Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke, and Zosia Mamet, navigating the challenges of relationships, work, and self-discovery in New York. The first season of Girls was filmed between April and August 2011. The first three episodes were screened at the 2012 SXSW Festival and the series premiered on HBO on April 15, 2012. The series ran for six seasons until April 16, 2017. There were a total of 62 episodes.
Dunham, who both created and starred in the series, aimed to provide an authentic representation of the experiences, struggles, and relationships of young women. She wanted to present a narrative that went beyond the glamorous or idealized portrayals often seen in mainstream media. Girls received attention for its frank and sometimes controversial depictions of sex, relationships, and personal growth. The cringe comedy show was seen as a departure from traditional television narratives, offering a more unfiltered and honest exploration of the complexities of adulthood, particularly from a female perspective.
The show has received critical praise and numerous awards, including the Golden Globe Award for Best Television Series – Musical or Comedy and the British Academy Television Award for Best International Programme.
In 2019, Girls was ranked 18th on The Guardian's list of the 100 greatest TV shows of the 21st century. In 2021, BBC placed it 30th on its list of the best series of the century. In 2022, the series was ranked 65th on Rolling Stone's list of the 100 greatest TV shows. In 2023, Variety included it at 86th on its own list of the greatest TV series of all time.
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Synopsis
Two years after graduating from Oberlin College, aspiring writer Hannah Horvath is shocked when her parents announce they will no longer financially support her life in Brooklyn. Left to her own devices, Hannah navigates her twenties "one mistake at a time." Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke, Zosia Mamet, Adam Driver, Alex Karpovsky, and Andrew Rannells co-star as Hannah's circle of friends, as they cycle through friendships, romantic partners, careers, and new experiences.
Topics explored
Girls explores several topics across its six seasons. Dunham explains Girls never started with an "overt, political, or even [exact] artistic mission statement." While the primary themes in the television show explore interpersonal relationships—particularly female friendship and romantic affairs—New York City culture, coming-of-age struggle, career, mental health, artistic boundaries and self-reflection, Dunham states the show was never "stuck in any specific formula." She also noted "the series reflects a part of the population that hasn’t previously been seen on either film or television and fills the gap between the characters on Sex and the City and the CW’s Gossip Girl." The series ultimately explores how significantly flawed, unlikable, morally ambiguous characters in their twenties navigate the challenges of adulthood and learn to embrace their imperfections.
Cast and characters
Main cast
Lena Dunham as Hannah Helene Horvath: an aspiring writer living in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, originally from East Lansing, Michigan, known for her spunk and bad decisions, who struggles to support herself and find a direction in her life. There is much conversation about Hannah's body and her own (as well as other characters') perception of it. In season two, she struggles with a relapse of the OCD symptoms she suffered from in her youth. In the final season, she becomes pregnant after a brief fling, and later leaves New York City to take a teaching job upstate and raise her baby.
Allison Williams as Marnie Marie Michaels: Hannah's best friend and, at the start of season 1, roommate. Marnie struggles in her relationships with Charlie and Ray for much of the series, and eventually ends up marrying her musical partner, Desi Harperin. When both her career and marriage ultimately collapse, she moves upstate with Hannah to help raise her baby.
Jemima Kirke as Jessa Johansson: One of Hannah's closest friends, Jessa is a global citizen of British origin and is known for being bohemian, unpredictable, and brash. Throughout the course of the series she deals with the consequences of poor choices, including a short-lived marriage and a stint in rehab due to heroin and cocaine addiction. When she pursues a relationship with Hannah's ex-boyfriend Adam, she and Hannah have an explosive falling-out. Ultimately, Hannah and Jessa manage to reconcile before Hannah's departure from New York.
Zosia Mamet as Shoshanna Shapiro: Jessa's naive and innocent American cousin who is a Media, Culture, and Communications major at New York University. She is embarrassed to still be a virgin at the start of the series. The character is fast-talking and her lack of enunciation gives her a mumbling, nervous persona. After a brief career stint in Japan, she comes to realize that her friendship with the other three has only ever held her back, and ultimately distances herself from them.
Adam Driver as Adam Sackler: an aloof, passionate young man who works as a part-time carpenter and actor. At the start of the series, he is in a casual relationship with Hannah, which becomes serious before ultimately falling apart as he gains success as an actor. He later enters a volatile relationship with Jessa, which is implied to be ongoing as the series ends. Adam is an alcoholic who has been sober for years.
Recurring guests
Becky Ann Baker and Peter Scolari as Hannah's parents, Loreen and Tad Horvath (seasons 1–6)
Christopher Abbott as Marnie's ex-boyfriend Charlie Dattolo (seasons 1–2, 5)
Kathryn Hahn and James LeGros as Katherine and Jeff Lavoyt, the parents of two young girls who Jessa babysat (season 1)
Chris O'Dowd as Thomas-John, an affluent venture capitalist. (seasons 1–2)
Rita Wilson as Evie Michaels, Marnie's mother. (seasons 2–6)
Jon Glaser as Laird Schlesinger, Hannah's neighbor and a recovering drug addict. (seasons 2–6)
Colin Quinn as Hermie, Ray's boss at the coffee shop. He dies in "Painful Evacuation" from scleroderma. (seasons 2–6)
John Cameron Mitchell as David Pressler-Goings, Hannah's editor for her e-book. (seasons 2–3)
Shiri Appleby as Natalia, Adam's ex-girlfriend. He abruptly breaks up with her after getting back together with Hannah. (seasons 2–3)
Gaby Hoffmann as Caroline Sackler, Adam's extremely troubled sister. (seasons 3–6)
Richard E. Grant as Jasper, Jessa's friend from rehab. (season 3)
Gillian Jacobs as Mimi-Rose Howard, Adam's new girlfriend after Hannah moves away to Iowa. (season 4)
Jason Ritter as Scott, an entrepreneur and Shoshanna's boyfriend. (seasons 4–5)
Guest stars
Chris Eigeman as Hannah's boss who fires her in the pilot. (season 1)
Mike Birbiglia as Brian, an employer who briefly interviews Hannah for a job. (season 1)
Skylar Astin as Matt Kornstein, Shoshanna's former camp counselor. (season 1)
Bobby Moynihan as Thadd, Thomas-John's best man. (season 1)
Jenny Slate as Tally Schifrin, a former classmate of Hannah whose professional success is a source of annoyance. (season 1, season 5)
Michael Imperioli as Powell Goldman, a former writing mentor of Hannah's she meets at a party. (season 1, episode 9)
Billy Morrisette as George, Elijah's first boyfriend after coming out to Hannah. (seasons 1–2)
Donald Glover as Sandy, a Black Republican who Hannah briefly dates. (season 2)
Jorma Taccone as Booth Jonathan, an avant-garde artist who leads Marnie on romantically after they meet at an art gallery. (seasons 1–2)
Greta Lee as Soojin, Booth's former assistant who hopes to open her own art gallery, much to Marnie's annoyance. (seasons 2–3)
Ben Mendelsohn as Salvatore, Jessa's flaky dad. (season 2)
Carol Kane as a member of Adam's AA group. (season 2)
Patrick Wilson as Joshua, a doctor with whom Hannah has a one-night stand. Years later, he delivers the news that she is pregnant. (season 2, season 6)
Production
Lena Dunham's 2010 second feature, Tiny Furniture—which she wrote, directed and starred in—received positive reviews at festivals as well as awards attention, including Best Narrative Feature at South by Southwest and Best First Screenplay at the 2010 Independent Spirit Awards. The independent film's success earned her the opportunity to collaborate with Judd Apatow for an HBO pilot. Judd Apatow said he was drawn to Dunham's imagination after watching Tiny Furniture, and added that Girls would provide men with an insight into "realistic females."
Some of the struggles facing Dunham's character Hannah—including being cut off financially from her parents, becoming a writer and making unfortunate decisions—are inspired by Dunham's real-life experiences. The show's look is achieved by furnishings at a number of vintage boutiques in New York, including Brooklyn Flea and Geminola owned by Jemima Kirke's mother.
Dunham said Girls reflects a part of the population not portrayed in the 1998 HBO series Sex and the City. "Gossip Girl was teens duking it out on the Upper East Side and Sex and the City was women who [had] figured out work and friends and now want to nail romance and family life. There was this 'hole-in-between' space that hadn't really been addressed", she said. The pilot intentionally references Sex and the City as producers wanted to make it clear that the driving force behind Girls is that the characters were inspired by the former HBO series and moved to New York to pursue their dreams. Dunham herself says she "revere[s] that show just as much as any girl of her generation".
Dunham's identity and her creative endeavors played a pivotal role in establishing the groundwork for the show, persistently surfacing in discussions surrounding "Girls." There are several key aspects: emphasis on the privileged environment of her upbringing in New York's art scene and her early intellectual maturity; her utilization of personal experiences to craft candid and humorous storylines; her generation's experience of minimal privacy both in real life and online; and her deliberate choice to portray her body onscreen, preemptively addressing potential criticisms regarding her body size.
As executive producer, Dunham and Jennifer Konner were both showrunners of the series while Dunham was the head writer. Apatow is also executive producer, under his Apatow Productions label. Dunham wrote or co-wrote all ten episodes of the first season and directed five, including the pilot. Season one was filmed between April and August 2011 and consisted of 10 episodes. As did the second season, running on HBO from January 13, 2013, to March 17, 2013.
Reception
Critical response
The first season of Girls received universal acclaim from television critics. On review aggregation website Metacritic, the series' first season holds an average of 87 based on 29 reviews. The website also lists the show as the highest-rated fictional series debut of 2012.
James Poniewozik from Time reserved high praise for the series, calling it "raw, audacious, nuanced and richly, often excruciatingly funny". Tim Goodman of The Hollywood Reporter called Girls "one of the most original, spot-on, no-missed-steps series in recent memory". Reviewing the first three episodes at the 2012 SXSW Festival, he said the series conveys "real female friendships, the angst of emerging adulthood, nuanced relationships, sexuality, self-esteem, body image, intimacy in a tech-savvy world that promotes distance, the bloodlust of surviving New York on very little money and the modern parenting of entitled children, among many other things—all laced together with humor and poignancy". The New York Times also applauded the series and said: "Girls may be the millennial generation's rebuttal to Sex and the City, but the first season was at times as cruelly insightful and bleakly funny as Louie on FX or Curb Your Enthusiasm on HBO."
Despite many positive reviews, several critics criticized the characters themselves. Gawker's John Cook strongly criticized Girls, saying it was "a television program about the children of wealthy famous people and shitty music and Facebook and how hard it is to know who you are and Thought Catalog and sexually transmitted diseases and the exhaustion of ceaselessly dramatizing your own life while posing as someone who understands the fundamental emptiness and narcissism of that very self-dramatization."
The second season of Girls continued to receive critical acclaim. On Metacritic, the second season of the series holds an average of 84 based on 19 reviews.
Tim Goodman of The Hollywood Reporter stated that "Girls kicks off its second season even more assured of itself, able to deftly work strands of hard-earned drama into the free-flowing comedic moments of four postcollege girls trying to find their way in life". David Wiegland of the San Francisco Chronicle said that "The entire constellation of impetuous, ambitious, determined and insecure young urbanites in Girls is realigning in the new season, but at no point in the four episodes sent to critics for review do you feel that any of it is artificial". Verne Gay of Newsday said it is "Sharper, smarter, more richly layered, detailed and acted". Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly felt that "As bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as it was in its first season, Girls may now be even spunkier, funnier, and riskier". In reference to the series' growth, Willa Paskin of Salon thought that Girls "has matured by leaps and bounds, comedically and structurally, but it has jettisoned some of its ambiguity, its sweetness, its own affection for its characters. It's more coherent, but it's also safer."
Criticism and impact
The pilot was met with criticism regarding the all-white main cast in the otherwise culturally diverse setting of New York City. Catherine Scott of The Independent asked: "What's there to celebrate for feminism when black, Hispanic or Asian women are totally written out of a series that's supposedly set in one of the most diverse cities on earth? But also, what's there to celebrate for feminism when a show depicts four entirely self-interested young women and a lead character having the most depressing, disempowered sexual relationships imaginable?" Fox News's Hollie McKay wrote that many white Americans are friends with other people of the same race, and adding a "token" African-American or Asian-American friend would be "immature" to reality. Writing at The Hairpin, Jenna Wortham deemed the series' lack of a main black character "alienating, a party of four engineered to appeal to a very specific subset of the television viewing audience, when the show has the potential to be so much bigger than that". Maureen Ryan from The Huffington Post attributes the lack of diversity to the industry as a whole, specifying that not only is it "easier (and lazier) to attack a 25-year-old woman who's just starting out than to attack the men twice her age who actually control the industry", but that "of all shows, this is the one that is being attacked for being too white."
Lesley Arfin, a writer for the show, responded to the criticism, tweeting: "What really bothered me most about Precious was that there was no representation of ME". Arfin later deleted the comment following backlash. Dunham has publicly said, "I really wrote the show from a gut-level place, and each character was a piece of me or based on someone close to me". She adds that she wanted to avoid tokenism in casting. The experience of a black character would involve a certain specificity, a type she could not speak to.
The New York Times concluded that the series earned praise "for its sexually frank, wryly satirical look at millennial angst" and criticism "for its lack of diversity while raising "an endless stream of essays and social media posts thanks to its explorations of gender politics and post-collegiate social panic". In a review for Ms., Kerensa Cadenas writes, "Despite its lack of a serious class and race consciousness, Girls does address other feminist issues currently in play, among them body image, abortion, relationships within a social media age, and street harassment." Kim Price of The Independent predicted that the Girls' legacy would be the series' "mainstreaming of 'gross-out' femininity" and "intermittent and sometimes cack-handed attempts to comment on contemporary issues such as race relations or lack of opportunities for young people".
Accolades
Since its debut, the series has received numerous accolades including two Primetime Emmy Awards, Peabody Award, a BAFTA Award, and a Directors Guild of America Award. Dunham has been nominated for sixteen individual awards for her role as the series lead, as writer, and as producer. Several of Dunham's collaborators have also been nominated for various awards including co-stars Allison Williams and Adam Driver as well as recurring guest stars Riz Ahmed, Becky Ann Baker, Gaby Hoffmann, Andrew Rannells, Matthew Rhys, Peter Scolari, and Patrick Wilson.
Broadcast
Girls premiered on April 15, 2012, on HBO in the United States. The first three episodes were screened at the 2012 SXSW Festival on March 12.
HBO renewed the series for a second season of ten episodes on April 30, 2012.
On January 7, 2014, the premiere of the third season of Girls was shown at the Rose Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City. Models Karlie Kloss, Karen Elson, and Hilary Rhoda; designers Nicole Miller, Cynthia Rowley, and Zac Posen; and editors Anna Wintour, Joanna Coles, and Amy Astley were all in attendance. The after party was at the Allen Room and "hosted by HBO and the Cinema Society".
International
Girls premiered on OSN in the Middle East on September 7, 2012. In Australia, it premiered on Showcase on May 28, 2012. The series began airing on HBO Canada on April 15, 2012. In New Zealand, the SoHo channel premiered Girls in May 2012.
In the United Kingdom and Ireland, the series premiered on Sky Atlantic on October 22, 2012. The second season premiered on January 14, 2013, and the third season began airing on January 20, 2014. The fourth season premiered on January 12, 2015.
