NYTimes asks Why Are So Many People Rewatching ‘Girls’?

A little over a decade after the show's debut, people are rewatching — and sometimes reconsidering — “Girls,” Lena Dunham’s series about four white women lurching through their 20s in New York City. The series’ viewership doubled between November and January compared with the previous three months, according to a spokesperson for HBO.

Returning and first-time viewers are dissecting the show in bars and group chats, uploading supercuts to TikTok and using “Girls” to reflect on the very recent past. (In Season 1, Marnie uses a Blackberry and Jessa has a flip phone.)

“I like to call it a period piece,” said Julia Gray, 27, a journalist in Brooklyn and the host of “Girls Room,” a “Girls” rewatch podcast she created last year.

“Girls” was released in 2012 amid a flurry of hot takes that argued millennials were the whiniest, laziest generation yet. The show knowingly played into and poked fun at those clichés beginning with its first episode, in which Ms. Dunham’s character, Hannah, is cut off by her parents and then declares that she may be the voice — “or at least a voice” — of her generation.

I hate articles like this.

Why does anybody do anything?

............. Ms. Dunham is aware of the “Girls” renaissance. On a phone call from Berlin, she said she was honored and a bit baffled by viewers’ renewed interest, which she found out about through texts from friends. She said she hoped viewers would appreciate the show despite the fact that some jokes may not land in 2023.

“My wish is that they’ll be able to maybe watch it away from some of the baggage it came with of the moment,” she said.

Even Ms. Dunham senses newfound distance between herself and the material. She recently watched a TikTok montage a friend sent her of Marnie (Allison Williams) and her love interest Charlie (Christopher Abbott) set to a Phoebe Bridgers song.

“I was actually quite moved,” Ms. Dunham said. “I almost forgot I had anything to do with it.”

I thought it was a terrific show.

When you rewatch it, it’s from a whole new LENS!

They watched it the first time because they were stupid. They're watching it now for the same reason.

It’s ten years old now and people are nostalgic for life before the pandemic changed everything. Girls was a slice of life show filmed realistically. It’s really not that hard to explain.

Additionally M3GAN was being marketed heavily in November and December so that would explain the sudden increase.

I rewatched it a couple of years ago. Total waste of time. The first season was fine. By the time Daddy came out the show was a disaster.

Did the Times conclude that the renewed interest in "Girls" is bad news for Democrats?

People got over how much Lena Dunham sucks and realized it's actually a very good show.

OP, because people can't believe that Lens never was human, really.

Like Rosie 0'Donnell in "Riding the Bus with My Sister," with an exhibitionism issue and a fist up her own cooch.

It's in my top 10 shows of all time up there with The Comeback, Mad Men, and The Sopranos..

And by far one of the shows you can rewatch over and over. I love that show!

It was always a very well written show. I would probably watch it again.

There was a scene where she tried to give a bj to a guy and the truck overturned. She also ran away from her bf instead of breaking up with him.

It was weird. She sucks.

Me too, r13. I only watched Sopranos once, when it was on, and haven’t revisited it yet, but I’ve watched the entirety of Mad Men, The Comeback, and Girls at least twice, and some episodes of The Comeback and Mad Men several times. Lena may annoy the fuck out of me, but Girls was a really great show.

I'd rather rewatch GOLDEN Girls.

As that quoted line about ‘the voice ... or at least A voice ... of my generation ‘ shows, there was always a lot of self-satire going on. Yes, the characters were mostly irritating but well acted and the show was usually well written.

Just like Lens herself, the show is really huge now

[quote]Ms. Dunham said. “I almost forgot I had anything to do with it.”

My sides, Lens!

Allison Williams Effect. M3GAN's first trailer dropped in October, movie landed in January. Check the numbers for GET OUT and THE PERFECTION, I bet they're up as well.

Millennial women are having a collective midlife crisis, with none of the usual trappings of midlife- husband, kids, house, overwhelming career - and this is nostalgic pablum to soothe them.

I’ve rewatched the scene of Andrew Rannels fucking Corey Stoll a few times…

First I watched this when I was in highschool, and then I rewatched the series during college with my roommate. I rewatched again last summer, and now that I'm out of college and in my 20s like the characters, I have a newfound understanding of the show and what it's really about. I can't believe someone my age made that show. I feel like I actually entered the real world after graduating college, and the unsettled and confused and directionless feeling that I have can really be seen in the lives of all 4 of the girls. I feel like I'm more of a Shosh, in that I had a pretty sheltered life and I dedicated so much of my life to making the "right" decisions. I've only been in one relationship and I spend a lot of time trying to keep myself well groomed and on a routine. But I feel this urge to completely break out and completely shift my life, similar to how she went to Japan. I genuinely didn't understand why she would want to go to Tokyo if she lived in New York, but I sort of get it now. She was trying to break free.

Wow, the NYT is really hitting it out of the park with these intellectual thinkpieces.

The NYTimes is asking because they've been hyping her since day 1 thanks to her connections, and they are damn mad she was over before she began.

I was never sure was unintentionally being humorous or not. Like I remember dying laughing when Hannah was hanging out in a summer house wearing a bikini, including while playing ping pong. And let’s not forget the end when she clearly had a black baby.

I couldn't even imagine having to sit through it once.

Girls! Girls!

A lot of the characters are underwritten. I didn’t realize what an enigma Shoshanna was until Dunham admitted it in the behind the scenes after the episodes. She said she wanted viewers to see that she was “surprise” actually smart, and “surprise” actually engaged. It’s like she was living this whole life off screen that we knew nothing about.

I couldn't bring myself to watch Girls when it aired because there were too many think-pieces about it. I might try watching it.

There were about 2 or 3 funny moments per episode, but most of the characters (and the actors who played them) were just too obnoxious and insufferable to make it worthwhile.

Next Up: Older Gen Z rediscover Lil' Peep.

This show might as well have never existed for all I ever heard about it.

I always liked Alison Williams as Marnie. She was so unlikeable, I started to like her. I admired Williams for not trying to make her a more likeable character.

And the Andrew Rannells episode about auditioning for the musical version of White Men Can’t Jump was a standout. He really should’ve been Emmy-nominated for that.

Alison Williams is a national treasure.

Allison!

And Adam Driver was just fearless in this role. His character was so awful most of the time and yet his commitment and charisma make him believable.

Oh and Lou Taylor Pucci’s disgusted face at Hannah’s horrific attempt at sexy talk - the kind of talk she and Adam did -is burnt into my brain. Ir surprises me that people don’t see the humour in this show.

R24= Lens Dunham

I heart r33

"... before the pandemic changed everything."

The flu changed nothing. Most of us had to go to work every day as usual. It's almost forgotten.

This thread is full of Frauen.

Could the NYT please go out and hire just ONE journalist? I've got a subscription and I've never read drivel like the stuff they've been spewing during the last 12 months.

Note that the article says viewership doubled between Nov and Jan compared with the previous three months. That could mean 3 people were watching it before and now 6 are.

Interesting that no one ever harps on this show for having all white main characters.

Why is that?

Are they sure those rewatches aren't all just Lena eating ice-cream and glued to the tv wondering where it all went so wrong?

[quote]Interesting that no one ever harps on this show for having all white main characters.

Are you joking? There was a whole controversy that was even referenced in the show with Donald Glover's one-episode appearance.

It’s a great show. A lot of DL is too old for it, which I don’t mean as a bad thing. I’m the same age as Lens and ran in similar circles - she PERFECTLY captured a certain type of millennial - liberal arts college educated, pseudo cultured, aimless and miserable.

And yes, these social circles are largely white and privileged.

This never happened.

R40 Shoshanna is really the only redeemable one of the main cast, and I think for that to be the case she had to have an implied off-screen life rather than throw around her narcissism and issues like the other three all the time.

I also never got the uproar over Lens looks at the time - she’s obese now, but looked like an average woman you’d see on the street when the show began. Is it because she dared to not look like a supermodel and have sex on an HBO show?

[quote]series about four white women

LOL.

Get over it.

The funniest scene is when the one bitch sings that Kanye song as a piano ballad for her work party

This shit didn't define us any more than "All in the Family" defined the Greatest Generation.

Some people were like these cartoonish ghouls, but most were not.

Girls was, for the most part, a mordant and bang-on depiction of millennial Brooklyn and all its attendant bullshit circa the 2010s - much more so than the Gen X fantasia of Sex and the City.

And yeah, it’s hilarious how much sputtering rage the idea that a neurotic and not particularly likeable woman who looked like a 24 year old Lena Dunham (or a 33 year old Sarah Jessica Parker) could find good(ish) looking guys to have sex with them - even if whatever the decade’s version of happily ever after proved elusive. Did anyone ever have that much to say about the sex lives of the supporting cast of Entourage? To say nothing of all the implausibly gorgeous strippers and goomars of the Sopranos.

The point they’re broad caricatures that do depict aspects of real people.

[qoute] Additionally M3GAN was being marketed heavily in November and December so that would explain the sudden increase.

Huh?

R10 Also it is clearly problematic. Everything is.

Girls captures that know it all phase of the early/mid 20s really well and how much of a mask it is. The characters were insufferable, but they were supposed to be that way because they were all narcissists Who thought they knew everything and came to find out they didn’t. They were all a mess.

I watched the show a few years back, and I still found it to be funny because it captures that age well and with humor.

However, Lena Dunham really bombed with her finale episode and should’ve left it with the episode before where they all seem happy in their lives at the party although they are different and growing apart. For whatever reason, Lena really had to bomb the ending with something that was kind of ridiculous with Hannah’s move to upstate New York with her baby, and then Marnie going with her, but realizing it was a mistake. Seemed to be an unnecessary epilogue and then otherwise good show.

[quote]The flu changed nothing. Most of us had to go to work every day as usual. It's almost forgotten.

A great many of us worked from home. You must be one of those anti-vaxxers who "did my own research."

R60 Essential workers never worked from home. A good third to half of the workforce.

Christopher Abbott was and still is adorable.

Exactly my type.

[quote]However, Lena Dunham really bombed with her finale episode and should’ve left it with the episode before where they all seem happy in their lives at the party although they are different and growing apart. For whatever reason, Lena really had to bomb the ending with something that was kind of ridiculous with Hannah’s move to upstate New York with her baby, and then Marnie going with her, but realizing it was a mistake. Seemed to be an unnecessary epilogue and then otherwise good show.

I completely agree with this.

R63 I agree for a show it sucked but I had a friend exactly her age who decided to have her baby and was a mess about it so it range true. Those type of girls are desperate for someone to love them so If they get accidentally pregnant they tend to keep it.

She should have gone full Springer and had a baby with Adam, who ended up with Jessa at the end of the show IIRC. Mess!

At least make it make sense. First off she and Ruiz Ahmed were so unrealistic and then, due to criticism of lack of black characters, she has a black baby.

Riz ^

Adam and Jessa made absolutely no sense as a couple. That’s my one issue with the ending of the show. I can buy them as a fling, or fuckbuddies, but married?

I think Hannah’s ending was extremely realistic. A lot of women like her have children as a way of attempting to “complete” themselves and totally fail at motherhood.

GIRLS is one of those shows that I could see coming back for more episodes, like SATC. I wouldn't mind getting an update on the characters.

What would the reboot be called? And Just Like Fat? A Voice of a Generation?

I agree the show was well written, and if you watched it understanding that it was meant to be a satire it was genuinely funny. But what made that so hard was that the Hannah character would act so narcissistic, so unself-aware, and so entitled, and you'd think it was parody, and then Lena would say something on social media in her own voice that was even more narcissistic and unself-aware and entitled, so it became hard to see if she was really in the joke.

I guess it's best understood as being akin to Woody Allen being a neurotic sex-obsessed hypochondriac in real life and then making fun of that in all his movies. The difference was that Allen was never on social media, so you always assumed it was just a put-on; with Dunham we knew differently because she couldn't shut up about herself on social media.

[quote]Interesting that no one ever harps on this show for having all white main characters.

Only 3 of the Girls were white. And were any of the guys white, besides Andrew?

Which one wasn’t white?!

Shoshanna was Armenian. She had that whole spiel about passing as white and how her real name was Oni but the kids at school couldn’t pronounce it so just called her Annie.

Wait…what?! I watched it and I don’t remember that. I thought she was just American Jewish.

I did not care for that STOCK FAGGOT character of Elijah.

Super Queeny

Super Sceney

Super Bitchy

He was there only to play off the straight girl characters- he could make bitchy, nasty remarks about Hannah's weight and clothes. There's no way they could have a low key gay guy who was only slightly effeminate because he would not be earning his keep as a GAY court jester the way Andrew Rannell's character of Elijah did.

Loved that hilarious scene where Andrew Rannells jerks off the freshman at the Oberlin party.

I think I saw less than 10 minutes of this show and that was all it took for me to realize it was shit. Dunham, who is quite unattractive, is told by her equally unattractive lover Adam Driver "You're pretty." And she replies "Fuck you." Why would anybody want to watch crud like this? Something must be wrong with them.

We watched it for Adam Driver

R78- He looks Neanderthal but was still out of her league.

I know DL loves to ridicule Lena, because there’s a lot there to ridicule. But I love this show and admire her for being such a fucking weirdo. She’s a nut but, ultimately, she’s our nut.

R80 I think they’re evenly matched, face wise. People are just much harsher on women’s looks.

Look over here! At me!!! My show has been rebooted.

R78 you sound fat

It was ridiculous that Andrew Rannells was playing someone 15 years younger than his actual age. No way Elijah was the same age as Hannah but they were in the same grade in college.

I love that it's a show with a completely white cast, which is so rare these days. Now notice that they always hire a biracial or asian girl sidekick, and then they have to have a moralistic B-plot which "underlines the importance of diversity or the harm of microaggressions and blah blah blah." It's a distraction from the main themes and plot of the show but the point is to win DEI points with the press and the liberal critics. But it makes sense, Lena is actually a real woman genius, so it makes sense they would go after her. They'd rather support a woman with no talent, like Amy Schumer, Mindy Kaling or Issa Rae

R84, you sound like one of the mental defectives who like this show. No, you ARE one.

I’ve rewatched it a bunch of times. It’s hilarious. Lens is talented. It’s a good show to watch when you’re depressed

[quote]He looks Neanderthal but was still out of her league.

All of her love interests and flings were our of her league: Driver, Donald Glover, Patrick Wilson, Jake Lacy, Riz Ahmed, etc. The only one who looked like a guy a non-rich/famous Lena Dunham might get is Laird, the beanie-wearing recovering addict who lived in her building and had a crush on her. (He ended up with Gaby Hoffmann.)

I just accepted Hannah's array of love interests on Girls as creator/showrunner privilege.

Someone mentioned the beautiful strippers and mistresses on The Sopranos, but no one expected us to believe James Gandolfini was in the same range of attractiveness as Oksana Lada and that she was with Tony because he was handsome, sexy, and great in bed. He was (within the limits of Irina's world) rich and powerful. She had been a dancer at his strip club, and being put up by him in a nice place was better than parading her wares at the Bada Bing. All of the ugly guy/beautiful woman pairings on that show had a similar power dynamic.

Anyway, I unknowingly added to those skyrocketing numbers! I watched Girls in whole in December/January. I'd never seen it. It never becomes as great a show as its best scenes promise, and there are storylines and characters that keep limping forward for much too long (such as Marnie's relationship with her maddening singer/songwriter boyfriend), but I enjoyed it on the whole. It ran for six seasons, and it's the kind of series from which you can pull out ten episodes that make it seem a major triumph. And they wouldn't all be early or late; highlights were scattered throughout. "The Panic in Central Park" and "American Bitch" are two of the best, and they are from seasons 5 and 6, respectively.

R78 yes, but not fatter than Lens

Some of you picky queens expect far to much content that fits exactly your taste. How do you find ANYTHING to watch?

Oh right, from 40 to death, it's just reruns of your same old 5 favourite series.

Adam driver is just as ugly as she is

This reads like a low level pr puff piece.

It speaks volumes that this show never hit it big in the gay community, since four women ensemble shows are almost beloved from the get go.

I will admit to enjoying Rannells’ character.

Also, someone on here once described Driver as looking like a gnu and I’ve never been able to unsee it.

Those two were the best actors on the show and made it watchable.

The only scene that matters in the entire series.

The episode called BAD FRIEND is my favorite. It's the one where Lens spends the whole evening walking around NYC in a mesh top and her tits out. It's honestly hilarious, and I'm virtually dead inside so that says a lot.

Hannah’s second boyfriend was even more out of her league than the Neanderthal.

He looked like a real live version of Howdy Doody

Roberta Smith, chief art critic of the NY Times, is related to Lens. One reason why the Times keeps publishing pieces on her.,

I still think most datalounge queens liked the original 1998 to 2004 Sex And The City better than GIRLS.

I enjoyed GIRLS overall but I'm still team SATC.

R91 Let me guess, Golden Girls, Will & Grace, Bewitched, The Nanny, and maybe throw in an old soap opera like Dallas.

I loved it when Marnie remade that dumb 90s song that goes “I’m not aware of too many things…” It was just so tacky and such a random song to choose to do. Lena wrote that well.

Hi Lena @ R91. There are plenty of great shows on TV today. That doesn't change the fact that yours was nothing more than nepo-baby navel gazing disguised as high art.

SNL did a vicious parody of the show, that was one of the few funny things they've done in the last twenty years.

R96- Mine too!!!! And 2nd is the Panic In Needle Park takeoff which Charlie and Marnie- 3rd probably involves the episode when Hannah's boss dies- David Pressler Goings? It's a fucking classic. It heavily features Gabi Hoffman, who I also love. Loved the Japan episodes too-

And I love Llaird and Booth Jonathan. The show had great secondary characters..

AND SOOJIN!@@@@ I love Soojin!!!! (Greta Lee was supposed to have some awesome show built around her 7-8 years ago, but then it never happened..

Love this show.

I am 44 in May, I wonder how old the haters are vs. the lovers. I was almost an entire generation ahead of these chicks. I remember being 33 when this show started and it totally resonated.

[quote]I loved it when Marnie remade that dumb 90s song that goes “I’m not aware of too many things…”

"What I Am" (Edie Brickell's only real hit) is a late-eighties song. She, Melissa Etheridge, and Tracy Chapman all released their debut albums the same year, 1988.

The Marnie video of it was hilarious: the auto-tune, the emphatic gestures, the calculated-looking "casual" poses mixed in. I only wished it had gone on longer, or that the show had provided a full-length version for YouTube.

The.joy of this show is hate watching it. It's coherent enough and well-produced enough to actually be a sustainable hate watch, instead of just hating the concept as it plays out over an episode or two.

I loved the indulgence and therapy of hating these little brats but also seeing parallels from my terrible 20's. I hated Lens as an over-indulged millennial personality, but hated more that she "gets it" about a lot of things, did some smart casting (Scolari!), and knew exactly which buttons to push. There's.juat as much to learn and observe as there is to hate here.

I also enjoy pissing off people who react pompously to the show like R78. What a shallow cunt.

I’m curious to watch it now that I can better manage my irrational dislike of Lena Dunham.

Lena may be easy to make fun of but she was brilliant. She’s the voice of her generation.

People need to re watch Six Feet Under

I love being part of the zeitgeist. So I'm going recherché and rewatching "The Mary Tyler Moore Show"! Also, the cognoscenti have moved on from "Girls" rewatching to "2 Broke Girls".

Natasha Lyonne was perfect casting to play Louise Lasser's daughter.

Before there was [italic]The White Lotus ...[/italic]

Was probably the target age demo for this (younger Millennial female) and never bothered watching it. Should I? The typical Millennial experience of binge-drinking and app-fucking and avo toast has never applied to my life, so I don't think I'll relate to it. Sometimes you can be too broke and depressed and hiki to relate to normal-person television.

Then again, I never bothered watching Breaking Bad or Game Of Thrones or Succession or White Lotus etc., either, and everyone says I should. Seems like too much bother to wade through all that now. Or is all that necessary Western cultural literacy by now?

The show never claimed to be writing about a "universal" millennial experience. Hannah claimed that she was doing that, but she is a character on the show, not the show. I feel like media types conflated Lena with Hannah in a way that distorted the general perception of the show.

The characters are strange and specific and damaged in strangely specific ways.

R111, You are UNCONCHABLE!! Absolutely UNCONCHABLE!!!

Boy oh boy the Times has gone down the crapper in recent years. Sad.

If people watch this show because the characters "resonate" with them and they identify with them then God help them. God.Help.Them.