Looking back ten years on Lena Dunham’s opus, Justice for Girls

A V.F. staff writer assesses who really won and who truly lost on HBO’s contentious series Girls a decade after it premiered.

Hannah Horvath, without sarcasm, exclaims, “I’m 13 pounds overweight, and it’s been dreadful for me my whole life!” On Girls, Lena Dunham, Jenni Konner, and Judd Apatow’s breakthrough HBO sitcom that launched ten years ago, this type of blatantly funny, comic-tragic, terribly unimportant yet painfully relevant insight was par for the course.

Girls was a contentious juggernaut, a cultural lightning rod, for six seasons, from 2012 to 2017—the watercooler show for everyone who attended to liberal arts school and was striving, as Dunham says in the premiere, “to become who I am.” I was an 18-year-old college freshman when the show premiered, old enough to sympathise with the central girls’ misfortunes and minor tragedies but young enough to believe that I would learn from their mistakes (don’t convince your teenage student to get their frenulum pierced; don’t get married to a man you barely know named “Thomas-John”; don’t smoke crack at a Brooklyn warehouse party). For what it’s worth, I was mistaken.

At the same time, I couldn’t get my head around the show’s enormous backlash and criticism, which targeted actors Allison Williams, Zosia Mamet, Jemima Kirke, and, most importantly, Lena Dunham. Sure, the central quad was the target of fair claims of favouritism. Even at the time, the rage that the programme sparked—the way Dunham and her series seemed to provoke universal terror and hostility—felt outsized.

“Girls is a television show about wealthy famous people’s children 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 dramatising your own life while posing as someone who understands the fundamental emptiness and narcissism of that very self-dramatization,” wrote John Cook for (the old) Gawker. “You think to yourself, Gloria Steinem went to the barricades for this?” when you see these and other sequences of the zeitgeist-y, early-20s heroines of Girls participating in, recoiling from, contemplating and regretting sex. The New York Times’ Frank Bruni wrote about it. These were a few of the finer notes. To put it plainly, Girls irritated a lot of people.

Putting personal sentiments aside, it’s amusing—even ironic—that the lads from Girls appear to have enjoyed the show’s rewards in the ten years since its premiere.

Take, for example, Adam Driver, who was plucked from obscurity to play Dunham’s Cro-Magnon actor lover, who is also named Adam. Since the release of Girls, Driver has been nominated for two Academy Awards, two BAFTAs, four SAG Awards, and a Tony Award, as well as starring in the multibillion-dollar Star Wars saga as Kylo Ren. Elijah, Hannah’s wayward homosexual closest friend and roommate, was played by Andrew Rannells. He was a well-known, Tony-nominated musical-theater performer before to Girls, and he now often shares top billing alongside Nicole Kidman, Don Cheadle, and Meryl Streep.

Late series additions like Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who played folk artist Desi, and Jake Lacy, who played a man named Fran, have gone on to bigger things as well, with Moss-Bachrach starring in The Punisher and The Dropout and Lacy displaying his aw-shucks energy in projects like Obvious Child—and then flipping it in The White Lotus. Even Christopher Abbott, who portrayed Charlie on Girls and famously resigned owing to alleged creative disagreements with Dunham in season two, has gone on to have a successful career as an indie film actor, earning a Golden Globe nomination.

A quick glance at other male guest performers on Girls—Skylar Astin, Zachary Quinto, Chris O’Dowd, Donald Glover—confirms that many of the males who passed through Girls departed not just unhurt, but better than when they arrived.

This isn’t to imply that the cast members of Girls haven’t gone on to achieve amazing things. On The Flight Attendant, Zosia Mamet was a fantastic sidekick to Kaley Cuoco. On Netflix’s Sex Education, Jemima Kirke played a headmistress who was preoccupied with punishment. And who can forget Allison Williams’ Oscar-winning performance as Rose in the horror flick Get Out? Dunham, too, has recently returned to Sundance with her critically acclaimed film Sharp Stick, in which she directed, wrote, and acted.

However, having a film selected for Sundance is not the same as receiving several Oscar nominations, and with the benefit of hindsight, none of the central quartet’s careers have seen the same precipitous rise as, say, Driver’s. Since the conclusion of Girls in 2017, Williams has only created two films, one of which will be released next year.

Acting isn’t a competition, of course. However, ten years later, it seemed that the girls on Girls were almost too convincing: too bad, too lost, too wounded. It’s awful to remember Jessa revealing Danielle Brooks’ Laura at her treatment clinic before relapsing with Richard E. Grant. It’s also difficult to see Marnie, who wears makeup that any RuPaul’s Drag Race participant would consider excessive, really ask Hannah if she’s ready to marry Desi, a man who has been engaged seven times.

(Yes, she is.) Hannah achieves full supervillain status in Season 4 when she co-opts Adam’s sister Caroline’s (Gabby Hoffmann) false narrative about a childhood relative who died of muscular dystrophy and uses it against him in a craven attempt to seek compassion from him.

Men might be just as bad as women, especially Adam, whose stalking of Hannah and contentious sex scene with Shiri Appleby in season two drew much condemnation at the time. However, Adam’s, Desi’s, Charlie’s, and the others’ worst behaviours didn’t appear to stick with Driver, Moss-Bachrach, or Abbott in the same manner. Girls was blatantly and brazenly unattractive— Its legacy demonstrates that there is nothing society despises more than a woman it finds ugly.

Many individuals appear to have minimal difficulty distinguishing male artists from their work. The female stars of Girls, on the other hand, are still indelibly tied to the hot mess characters they portrayed on the show, which may explain why they have earned very little acknowledgment for their work on the programme, both during its run and since it finished. Only Dunham, who was nominated for three Emmys for lead actress in a comedy and won a Golden Globe in 2013, was acknowledged by a major awards organisation. (By the way, during the course of the programme, Driver was nominated for three Primetime Emmys, and the late Peter Scolari, who portrayed Hannah’s homosexual father, Tad, received a guest-acting Emmy in 2016—the show’s only Emmy for acting.)

Dunham was the show’s creator, frequent writer, and star, and she received all of the show’s significant criticisms, much of which were directed at her physical appearance and insistence on being naked on camera. The criticisms were both absorbed and mirrored by the girls: In season three, Marnie yells at two guys criticising her (awful) music video for “What I Am,” “No, seriously: Let’s make fun of the lady who took a chance and put herself out there creatively.” As Dunham, who co-wrote the episode with Konner, enters the lines, you can practically hear the keyboard clacking away.

Girls wasn’t a great show by any means. There was a fundamental lack of variety, even if it was genuine. (I, for one, had no idea those Girls knew anyone who was black.) Following much criticism, it made a clumsy attempt to fix the problem by cramming in random plotlines like Glover’s dreadful Black Republican arc. Behind the scenes, there were also severe concerns, most notably with writer Murray Miller, who was accused of sexual abuse in 2017. (At the time, Dunham backed him and has subsequently apologised.) Miller rejected the claims and was not charged as a result.) Dunham has a tendency of making headlines for saying and doing ill-advised things, the majority of which have nothing to do with her profession.

But now that I’ve finished watching Girls, I can’t shake the feeling that the show’s central female characters received twice as much criticism and half as much praise as their male coworkers for their outstanding work—that they became symbols of everything that was wrong with white, hipster, millennial culture simply because Girls told the truth. And, if not “the” truth, at least “a” truth about how a certain group of (upper-middle-class, overeducated, myopic, millennial) characters would traverse the world at the moment.

The beauty of Girls is that it provided a safe environment for young women to be awful, make errors, and be totally and utterly themselves on camera. The issue is that the programme was so unique that its primary women have yet to be allowed to leave it fully. Dunham, her co-stars, and the show as a whole were always at their finest when they were operating in their own lane, oblivious to the detractors and blithely soaring above the firestorms they were continually igniting in their wake. They didn’t always succeed in achieving this aim, but that’s okay. They were only girls, after all.