The Great GIRLS Rewatch
It's the superior HBO show about four female friends...
Every man and their dog is rewatching GIRLS, or at least that’s how it seems to me. Thanks to the youngsters discovering the show via TikTok supercuts and its availability on streaming services (it’s all on NOW in Ireland), people are talking about Lena Dunham’s unflinching and hilarious depiction of the lives of four friends in 2010s Greenpoint - bedazlled Blackberries and all. The New York Times even did a great piece on it, which you can read here behind a paywall. I for one am thrilled that this utterly fantastic show is getting the attention it deserves, and thanks to the benefit of hindsight, the respect.
I know it was well received at the time from a critical point of view, and it obviously got good enough viewing figures to run for six seasons. However, I remember a lot of people dragging GIRLS to hell because the characters were all so annoying, or touting it as far-fetched and unrealistic. I begged to differ at the time, and I still do. To me, it’s the most realistic depiction of being in your twenties I have ever seen - and sorry, but 20-somethings are often bloody annoying. It doesn’t matter that they’re privileged Brooklyn hipsters in the grand scheme of things, because they really are just girls and not yet women. So many of the experiences, feelings, heartbreaks are universal.
So let’s look at the things that made it great, shall we?
The Girls
Hannah Horvath, Marnie Michaels, Shoshanna Shapiro and Jessa Johannson. Friends, frenemies, relatives, ride or dies. All beautiful, smart, irritating, hilarious and hugely affecting. Watching them grow and change over the course of six years was a wild ride, not least because I was doing it myself at the same time, just a little older than they were. I had such strong feelings about them because they were almost TOO relatable. I was a Marnie/Hannah mash-up, so those characters riled me because they were me. I was just as annoying and cringey, wild and innocent, curious and ambitious and excitable. It was like looking in a mirror, and that made me uncomfortable but in a way that also made me feel seen.
The Guys
OMG, the men. So brilliantly written and performed. Nihilistic and crotchety Ray. Odd and talented Adam. Sappy Charlie. Amazing Elijah. Hannah’s Dad. Droopy drawers Desi. For a show called GIRLS, the guys were truly brilliant. Each character’s arc in relation to the gals was just perfection. And JESUS, Adam is such a ride by like season three.
The Guest Stars
Patti LuPone! Riz Ahmed! Jenny Slate! Matthew Rhys! Donald Glover! Lisa Bonet! Aidy Bryant! All top notch. Our own Chris O’Dowd even showed up for a few episodes.
The Set Pieces
There are a few standalone episodes that take the characters out of the series’ running narrative, and this is something Dunham does so well. There’s the one where Hannah shags a hot doctor she served at the coffee shop, and another where she interviews an important author with a murky reputation. There’s the one where Shosh is in Japan. But the best one of all is The Panic In Central Park, where Marnie spends one magical night with her ex, Charlie, who has morphed from sweet but dopey tech bro to bad boy drug dealer. It makes no sense (he has a new accent, all traces of the old Charlie are erased) but it is a simply stunning episode of television.
The Ending
Is anybody ever happy with a show’s ending? I don’t think so. But the end of GIRLS is great because the real ending isn’t the last episode, it’s the penultimate one. If you’re watching for the first time, know that!
I had Hannah’s exact mustard cardigan from Urban Outfitters
The Lack Of Glamour
People inevitably draw comparisons between GIRLS and Sex and the City, and I totally get that - it’s an HBO dramedy about four female friends. But while SATC leaned in to its iconography of high heels and martini glasses, especially in those blasted films, GIRLS didn’t have an iconography to exploit. Their clothes aren’t aspirational, they often have bad hair and thrift-store looks. There’s a scene where Hannah cuts herself an awful fringe that is almost painfully relatable. It was never about wanting to be like the girls, because we already were.
The Writing
Whatever you think about Dunham (and I totally get people having feelings about her particular brand of oversharing), she is a bloody brilliant writer. The dialogue, the jokes, the set-ups, it was all absolutely masterful. I have so many favourite moments, but Jessa and Adam’s mutual masturbation is right up there, as is Hannah and the headmaster, the all-women nightmare camp, Marnie’s singing and rapping throughout and of course, all the wildly uncomfortable and awkward sex scenes. But the very best part of the entire show is Andrew Rannells as Elijah. His character is written with so much humour, tenderness and intimacy. The part when he sings Let Me Be Your Star at a Broadway audition altered my brain chemistry.
So if you’ve been holding off watching because you heard it’s weird or exasperating, or you caught a couple of GIRLS episodes when it was airing and didn’t click with it, I beg you to go and watch it again. It’s a show made for bingeing, and I’m not joking when I say watching it made me a better writer. It’ll break your heart a little, but in a good way. And it’ll remind you that no matter how much you’d like more buoyant breasts or some collagen and elasticity in your skin, you’d never go back to being 22 for all the tea in China.
