100 Favorite Shows: #20 — Girls
“I just wish someone would tell me, like, ‘This is how the rest of your life should look.’”
[Disclaimer: In 2017, a former writer of Girls, Murray Miller, was accused of rape by Aurora Perrineau. In response, Girls showrunners Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner released a statement defending Miller, which was well-reported on by Constance Grady of Vox. Dunham later issued an apology in The Hollywood Reporter. The response from Dunham and Konner was blatantly unacceptable, but the most heinous aspect of all this — it should not be forgotten — is the initial rape allegations against Miller.]
When Lena Dunham won the Best Narrative Feature prize at South by Southwest for her 2010 film, Tiny Furniture, she garnered the attention of many critics and creators, including Judd Apatow, who sought out Dunham’s writing talents to develop a comedy-drama series based on her experiences living in Brooklyn. Picked up by HBO, Girls was Dunham’s slice-of-life (and navigating it, too) entry into the culture with the developmental support of both Apatow and Jenni Konner, who produced, wrote, and directed on the series. Girls centered around four alliterative women, Hannah Horvath (Dunham), Marnie Michaels (Allison Williams), Jessa Johansson (Jemima Kirke), and Shoshanna Shapiro (Zosia Mamet), their friendships and loves, their highs and lows. Girls debuted on April 15, 2012 and concluded on the nearly symmetrical (like most things on Girls), April 16, 2017, leaving an indelible impact on the television landscape behind — controversial as that impact may have been.
(Go with me here. This essay contains spoilers for Girls, Mad Men, and Avatar: The Last Airbender.)
There’s hardly any way to begin an essay about Girls than with the cultural breakthrough quote from Hannah in “Pilot,” “I think that I may be the voice of my generation. Or, at least, a voice of a generation.” Dunham herself knows how much the sentiment has become inextricably tied to her identity as a writer in this world, but it’s for a good reason. Very few shows have such a clear thesis from the first episode about what thematic territory the series will cover. Even fewer manage to follow through on the premise’s promise. But in every thinkpiece-inspiring episode and every hate-watch from viewers who couldn’t divert their attention from the Brooklyn escapades, Girls was exactly what it wanted to be.
The quote was emblematic of the series’ proclivity for thinking it was edgy (but always being subtly aware that the culture of the country, especially among its younger demographics, was shifting towards Girls long before Dunham brought her concept to HBO) and for narrowing its focus far more specifically than attempting to make an artistic statement for the entirety of the millennial population.
In “Pilot,” Girls also specifically addresses its clear lineage to Sex and the City (as Shoshanna debates which of those characters she’s most aligned with, as many would later try to match their personalities with the characters and archetypes of Girls, too), but is clear in its intent to push further than Sex ever managed to do. Girls was far less glamorous than Sex and the City. What with the characters’ messy, abrasive love lives and careers (ranging from unpaid internships to subway fare dodging to dingy studio apartments), Girls always strove for a realistic take on how young go-getters would actually fare if their ties were cut loose in a city as expensive and unforgiving as New York.
Through this conception, Girls managed to interrogate many of the world views Dunham found herself ingratiated in from a very young age. It strove to tackle ideas of femininity, self-esteem, and body image, even when it faltered in other avenues of thematic exploration (especially when considering how intrinsic the topic of race should have been to a series set in Brooklyn, yet this was clearly a perspective Girls fell short on with an exceedingly white cast). But when Dunham could connect with an issue that was personal to her (like season six’s “American Bitch,” which depicts a power-hungry writer (Matthew Rhys) manipulating Hannah into sexual acts), Girls hit better than arguably any show from the last decade. The raw humor, the actors who came to play (from Colin Quinn to Richard E. Grant to Gillian Jacobs), the nuanced portrayal of female friendships. They all stemmed from Dunham’s perspective. Her specific, privileged, and largely insufferable perspective, but a perspective nonetheless.
It’s just not a very worldly perspective. In the season two episode, “Bad Friend,” Hannah applies for a freelance position that pays for high-concept articles and personal essays, rooted in topics that would intrigue any average Internet reader. The woman who hires Hannah (Angela Featherstone) intimates that “freelance magic” happens outside Hannah’s comfort zone and, after providing an inventory of potential subjects that could generate massive click counts, gives her the idea to snort cocaine and write about what ensues.
Seeing this as a way to expose her vulnerabilities to the Internet, Hannah goes all in on a cocaine-fueled binge across the city with her and ex-boyfriend turned close friend, Elijah (Andrew Rannells). Their Brooklyn-based sense of young independence places them in a night of upheaval and overindulgence. For them, they’re on top of the world. For us, they’re acting obnoxiously, as if they’re still concerned with petty high school drama. Icona Pop blares at their night club, Elijah judges Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close without seeing it, and Hannah admits that her greatest dream (and nightmare) is to sleep with herself.
It’s one thing to party in this way across Brooklyn without taking illegal drugs, but it’s another to do it on a Wednesday night in a way that co-opts the strongest, most dangerous elements of drug addiction for the purpose of Hannah’s “art.” Her only reason for taking cocaine is to write about it in a story line that exposes how selfish and entitled she can act on an episode-by-episode basis. At a time when the drug crisis routinely demolishes the lives of disaffected, disadvantaged citizens, ascribing a stigma to them for life, it’s almost a bit sickening to watch Hannah’s co-opting because it’s all a product of her privilege. What is the “fun night” that connects to her source of income is the debilitating result of an unconquerable addiction for others. But just like Icona Pop, Hannah and Elijah don’t care.
These sorts of uneasy dynamics percolate throughout Girls (and turned off many viewers), which is why we have to look for the redeeming qualities in each of the characters, even if they are trivial, even if they are scant.
For Elijah, I felt like I could overlook much of his narcissistic behavior in favor of how funny the character was written. Obviously, Rannells is a top notch personality in the television, film, and theater industry, bringing a resonant sexy confidence to every role. But on Girls, he was eventually given the keys to the comedy engine of the show, levying as many one-liners as Troy on Community or Suzanne on Designing Women. I count two stellar moments in “Bad Friend” alone. One when Elijah quips, “This isn’t gonna be a night of driving around in your mom’s Volvo with a bottle of cough syrup and a box of cold McNuggets.” The other when he arrives at the seedy underground apartment of Booth Jonathan (Jorma Taccone), Marnie’s date for the night, and asks, “Is this a bank?” In the hall of hysterical television characters, Elijah is a first ballot inductee.
For Marnie, redemption through perception comes in the way she is unable to remove herself from the psychological sexcapades with Booth, even when he seems like a spineless sycophant who is threatening her safety and comfort. When he first meets her for the night, he remarks that his favorite thing to watch is “young people” who give up the second they experience a struggle in life. This alone is a red flag, considering how intent Booth is on watching people suffer, but Marnie absorbs the attention from Booth too thoroughly and can only say yes to every bizarre suggestion he concocts for the two of them (including locking her in a narrow column of shock screen televisions — Marnie’s only response? That he’s talented).
Like Hannah and Elijah’s night of adventure, Marnie’s evening is almost nauseating to watch, as any rational person would know when to step away and just go to sleep. But we can empathize and see the good within Marnie by the pure knowledge that she’s just looking for someone to find value within her. Aren’t we all? Yes, Marnie’s behavior is condemnable and borderline shameful in other episodes, but she’s only going along with Booth here because she’s curious to try out different roles and experiences in a quest for her truest identity. It’s like Marnie treats New York as a dressing room for her many personalities.
In the early days of Girls, these moments of frustration for the characters’ actions are at their most infuriating because they contain actions many viewers can see within themselves and their own personal histories. Even though the interpersonal conflicts are superficial and they become more special as the characters grow and become forced to deal with “real shit,” they’re always valid. (For example, Hannah’s initial conflict centers around feeling mistrusted by her parents (Becky Ann Baker and Peter Scolari), but in season four, the storyline shifts and she is forced to help her parents experience an amicable divorce and mutual identity crises.) After all, one’s complicated experience doesn’t negate another person’s struggles, even if it’s clear that some struggles require more attention than others. Once the characters on Girls let go of that need to compete with one another’s drama, they find a new way to look at the world. A new way that indicates support as the most crucial factor for emotional survival through an uncertain period of life. We’re all just trying our best.
That’s the central idea of Girls: determining one’s true identity. And on Dunham and Konner’s series, this was achieved through lived experience (not manufactured experience), rather than striving to always rise up to the expectations of others. The purer the characters become and the more honest their attentions, the more clearly we feel this theme persist throughout the show. For example, Hannah, secure in her identity as not being a “go with the flow kind of funky youth,” is vastly more tolerable as someone who pursues her writing goals at the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop or delivers an unprompted storytelling at a reading of The Moth (hosted by Ophira Eisenberg) or when she stops striving to top her friends after witnessing the interior shortcomings of Tally (Jenny Slate). She’s not only being honest with others; she’s being honest with herself. No hangout personas, no Facebook profile pictures. Hannah unfiltered is the most empathetic form of Hannah.
At the same Moth reading that Hannah admits she’s not funky, she also describes her best friend, Jessa, as the result of Brigitte Bardot and a mermaid having a baby together. Over time, as Hannah grows more confident in herself and more comfortable in failure, she also loses the closeness that once kept her perpetually bound to Jessa’s friendship. A self-destructive, spontaneous soul in Brooklyn, Jessa portrays an aura of unfeeling in most social situations (and an overall lack of responsibility), but she actually strives to mask the intensity with which she harbors the emotions for those she loves.
By season five, this intensity comes to the surface more and more frequently as Jessa realizes she’s losing Hannah’s friendship and attempts to convince herself that that’s something she can live with. However, she’s also buckled underneath the weight that, for once, the distance in their companionship was her fault and not Hannah’s. The central relationship of Girls’ first seasons is between Hannah and Adam (Adam Driver), but their on-again, off-again dynamic is on its staunchest life support when Adam is rejected by Hannah at the end of season four and finds his way to Jessa at the beginning of the season finale.
In the volatile, “I Love You, Baby” episode (a satisfying reference to Frankie Valli, who croons over the installment’s closing montage) at the end of season five, the romantically open and flirtatious dynamic between Adam and Jessa explodes into a culmination of season-long resentment as Jessa finally confesses that she will never forgive him. Not for any one of their myriad arguments, but for the fact that he turned her from a hateable person, but Hannah’s closest friend, to a person who steals her friends’ boyfriends (once again shifting the blame away from herself).
A dear friendship was lost forever and as she and Adam both grow further apart from someone they believed to be a lifer, they find themselves growing closer together and it’s impossible for either to reconcile. After all, for as honest as Adam and Jessa were with one another (they were more honest and vulnerable than any other character pairing), Hannah’s influence still managed to creep in. Does Hannah still like them? What are her perceptions of their relationship? These are the questions (as well as the alleged hatred for Hannah) that fuel their passionate, episode-long fight that drives them to the point of violent sex and Shining-esque door shattering.
On the other hand, Hannah reveals her inadvertent overhearing of this brawl at the Moth reading, showcasing a different side of what it means to be emotionally vulnerable. It’s just that while Hannah handles her side of the feelings with grace, Adam and Jessa express their love language in a more raw capacity. Their relationship uncorks mayhem throughout the Girls universe. Even though the pairing of Adam and Jessa is the most electrifying Girls ever became (and Driver and Kirke are the series’ most gifted performers, so any scene featuring the two of them was the most eye-catching on television each week), it was hard not to side with Hannah.
Demolishing an entire apartment and then having sex in the chaos is no solution to unresolved feelings of loss. But to work through a story and speak honestly about one’s feelings with a knowing sense of forgiveness? Somehow, it was Hannah progressing the furthest of her friend group (save for Shoshana, who manages to direct her feelings about the group to her former friends’ face), even after a supremely shallow beginning.
To be fair, Adam did make an admirable attempt to grow up as Girls wound to its conclusion. In the eighth episode of the final season, “What Will We Do This Time About Adam?,” Adam reluctantly walks out of his apartment with Jessa and seeks out Hannah in an effort to offer to raise her baby (conceived with the Hamptons’ surf instructor, Paul-Louis (Riz Ahmed)). For Adam, a forthcoming baby made the acknowledgement of his late twenties and early thirties a reality; it was time to stop shirking responsibility and let the youthful flings and one-night escapades of his life go. And with Hannah, he felt that the history he shared with her could not be erased. The rational calculation was to raise the baby with her.
But he’s scared. About the idea of becoming a surrogate father. About the idea that the life he’s led will turn up nothing else for him when it comes time to reflect back on his best years. About how everything he feels is crashing down on him, from adult expectations to an existential place in the world. And yet, his reaction to Hannah’s laundry list of irrational fears about how she’ll inadvertently kill her baby (knowing Hannah? They’re not impossible fears) is one of complete calm. He relays a story about how he swallowed his puke at his first ever sleepover from fear of being sent home, illuminating Hannah to the idea that we’re all doing the best we can — even if some are better at it than others. It’s not ideal to swallow vomit, but sometimes, it’s all we can manage. What’s unimportant to the world may be a story we recollect for decades until it becomes exactly what someone else needs to hear.
It’s a particularly profound moment in an otherwise quaint episode. Hannah and Adam pleasantly walk down the street, almost mirroring their early, occasionally idyllic boyfriend-girlfriend status. Hannah explains she’s intuitively ready to have a bady, Adam recalls that Jessa laughs during sex, he gets his finger stuck in a soda bottle. It almost seems like they could make it as parents until the soda bottle leads to chips in their fantasy. Believing that soda has toxins that would poison Hannah’s fetus, Adam finishes the fizzy drink for her, even though he’s completely ignorant as to what a pregnant woman should or should not drink.
This moment leads to another when Adam explains that he sought out Hannah to “get out of [his] own head for a while,” signaling his commitment is dwindling in the span of one afternoon. (After all, Adam has been paying rent on a month to month basis on his apartment for the past eight years.) When the pair are finally forced to commit to one another (after Hannah and Adam, in a diner, solemnly agree they’ll need to get married to raise the baby), their voices waver. Just when shit between Adam and Hannah gets real, they always flake out, knowing deep down that they’re just fundamentally wrong for one another. The former lovers choke up, the fantasy dissolves in their fingers, and a relationship once thought to be eternal is finally buried.
“If I buzz, will you let me in?” Adam asks instead, departing from Hannah and returning to Jessa. Throughout the entirety of “What Will We Do This Time About Adam?,” Jessa was flustered by the fact that Adam wanted to push his life forward, but was also flustered by the fact that it bothered her at all. Suddenly, her feelings were real and to attack them down to a repressed ventricle of her heat, she sought out sex with a stranger (and sobbed throughout). When Adam returns, it’s almost paradise for Jessa, who only suffered his loss for a day. But knowing these two characters and their fanciful, “anything goes” lifestyles, the idea of their permanence is also a fleeting fantasy — even if the show leaves them together at the end.
While the Adam and Jessa story pulls a lot of weight to bring the viewer back on the side of two hurricane characters in the face of their low-key, but unthinkable actions, it only took one episode to squash every hater of Marnie that still lurked around the Girls think piece realm. (I always felt that I was an ardent Marnie defender at that, knowing how dynamic her character was, even if she was groan-worthy on the surface.) Season five’s sixth episode, “The Panic in Central Park,” is as redemptive an installment of television for one character as Mad Men’s “Signal 30” is for Pete Campbell or Avatar’s “Zuko Alone” is for Zuko. For Marnie, we finally see Girls from her perspective, as a woman endlessly chasing what she hopes will make her happy.
The episode begins with Marnie going for a walk to get some space from her overbearing husband (whom she reluctantly married), Desi (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), but quickly pivots into its own fantasy as her former flame, Charlie (Christopher Abbott) enters into her day from a cat-calling sidewalk almost magically. He has a different look to him and he’s put on some pounds, but Marnie’s double take grinds her in her tracks the moment she sees his kind, bewildered eyes. It’s fantasy enough to meet Charlie, but as they embark on a wild night of romantic thrills and social escapades, it’s clear that Marnie feels a much deeper need for escapism from the reality of her dwindling youth. It’s not enough to dream about running away and opening a general store; she needs a genuine way out — a plausible way.
Granted, the episode is still plenty full of Marnie’s insufferability (it’s who she is). A dress shop clerk (Lane Moore) pays Marnie one compliment in her red gown (which she later aims to show off at a party by pointedly telling Charlie, “I’m not staying here alone in this dress”) and Marnie spins off into an explanation of her life story and how she’s just done so much in her twenty-five and a half years. Even when a mugger (Justin Rodriguez) demands Marnie’s purse and jewelry, all she can think to say is, “I didn’t know people get, like robbed anymore.” If Marnie’s world is an enclosed, perfect snowglobe, then “The Panic in Central Park” is the episode that finally stops turning it upside down and instead decides to shatter it on the floor.
There are a few moments that speak to the last vestige of a free-wheeling youth about Marnie (when she showers and realizes she’s not alone in Charlie’s bathroom, she decides to make late night conversation, for example). But ultimately, “The Panic in Central Park” aims solely to irrevocably change the trajectory of Marnie’s life.
It all transpires in one scene, perhaps the best Girls ever depicted, when Marnie and Charlie flip over a rowboat they stole and Marnie decides to let her body float underwater as an epiphany cascades across her face. At once, the history of Girls seems to wash over her and she realizes how manipulative Desi is and how unhappy he makes her. She realizes that Charlie has plenty of baggage that’ll lead her back to the same place she was at with Desi, no matter how free-spirited he may seem (he’s good for a night, but he’s not an ideal). She realizes that what she wants is to enjoy her life for what she wants it to be and who she wants to be, rather than giving up on every dream she pursues and rushing to every preordained life checkpoint she feels beholden to.
As I took notes on the episode, the scene left my eyes glued to the screen and my pencil dangling limply between my fingers. I didn’t even know how to begin to take notes on this particular moment of Girls, which seemed to say everything the show (and Marnie) was about without uttering a single line of dialogue. All I knew was that it as a gorgeous, transcendent moment of television that reaffirmed why I’ll always love this medium more than any other. First watching the episode in a darkened den room at my home back in 2016, I had no way to relate to any of the characters on Girls, but I loved them all the same. I cared about Marnie and I wanted her to rise out of the water reborn, ready to kick down any sandcastle on shore.
From that moment on, Marnie is a changed woman because she realizes that she doesn’t need to change anyone to suit her own ideal of friendships, relationships, and familial bonds. Through a soaked ride on the subway (scored to “Little Marriage” by Lia Ices), Marnie finds serenity and finds the ability to stop worrying about pleasing everyone. She was a character who was consumed with nerves about stealing another person’s rowboat, but by the end of “The Panic in Central Park,” she doesn’t even give that stolen purse a second thought. For once, Marnie is content to be who she is: a woman in the moment and a woman refusing to let it pass by.
The character on Girls who always maintained the least drama (aside from the series’ voice of reason, Ray (Alex Karpovsky), who is introduced to the core group via Charlie), though, was Shosh. Hannah was nebbish and captivating, Jessa was abrasive and unpredictable, Marnie was superficial and revelatory. But Shoshanna, for all of her innocence and speed speaking, was probably Girls’ least problematic (in the purest sense of the term) character. Before anyone else is ready to move on from the group, Shosh manages to break away from the group, electing to move to Japan at the end of season four.
There, given a reprieve from the endless haranguing and drama of her core group in the U.S., Shoshanna realizes what true independence and freedom to determine her own routine, even in a foreign environment, means for her own development. It means confidence, recognition of the faults in others and in internalized locations, and the ability to speak directly when called upon to do so. Her transformation is the most fully realized at the end of Girls, as the penultimate episode, “Goodbye Tour,” features the climactic moment rooted around Shoshanna explaining that Hannah, Marnie, and Jessa have been keeping her from realizing her fullest potential. The one who spoke the quickest and the least at the start of Girls is the one who ends the friend group with the most efficient speech in a crowded, messy bathroom. It’s the end of the girls.
“Goodbye Tour” is really the finale of Girls, whereas the actual series finale, “Latching” is more of an epilogue. After all, “Latching” is just a three-hander between Hannah, her mother, and Marnie (four-hander if you count Hannah’s baby, Grover). But before the actual finale, we see each character retain an ending best-suited to what they deserved, more than what they earned.
Ray finds love in Shoshanna’s boss from Japan, Abigail (Aidy Bryant), who kisses him on a carousel and records an audio history of Brooklyn with him. Elijah finds a path forward to explore his acting ambitions. Shoshanna moves forward with purpose and Jessa carries on with a carefree attitude. Each character just wants to be happy in their lives, but some are more uncertain than others as to what exactly it means to be happy when their friend group splinters and leaves them apart from one another.
As for Hannah and Marnie, their path forward is together. Marnie decides to move in with Hannah (who elected to raise her baby in upstate, suburban New York, rather than in the city) as a pseudo-nanny. She partially seeks Hannah’s undivided attention as a friend (she’d never get it as a human, of course), seeking validation in the idea of being, at least, someone’s best friend. But she also seeks the next step of her purpose in this world, even if she’s not quite ready for the sole responsibility of taking care of someone else. The best she can do is be adjacent to Hannah’s needs.
In the epilogue, though, it is largely a Hannah narrative. Story-wise, Hannah’s goal is simply to convince Grover to latch onto her for breastfeeding (a simple conceit to project Hannah’s fears of failure onto her new life of motherhood), while Marnie is most concerned with singing along to Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.” As a character, though, it brings her full circle from the pilot. When Girls began, Hannah was cut off from the support from her parents. When Girls ended, Hannah witnessed a teenager running away from home, simply because she didn’t get her way one time.
Undoubtedly, Hannah sees herself in this girl and scolds her for acting the way she regretted acting in the six years leading up to “Latching.” Finally understanding that what matters in life is the support she receives (and, in tandem, the support she gives to baby Grover), we can rest, knowing that whatever chapter of her life Hannah Horvath was navigating throughout Girls has come to an end. Whether the book is a happy ending we don’t yet know, but we do know that, at least this time, Hannah managed to complete one stage of her development successfully. It’s in the “Fast Car” lyrics she hums to Grover as he finally latches onto her.
Anyplace is better
Starting from zero got nothing to lose
Maybe we’ll make something
But me myself I got nothing to prove
For now, Grover and Hannah are united. There’s nothing to prove, at least for this one moment. But Hannah still lives with a newborn baby. And her mother. And Marnie fucking Michaels. This chapter is over, but there’s a lot of pages left to turn. At least on Girls, the ones we got to read were as captivating as any ever written. They had a feeling that they belonged and we had a feeling we could be someone, be someone, be someone.
