It’s official: Lena Dunham’s millennial magnum opus Girls is coming back, and it’s in large part thanks to Gen Z giving the show its long overdue redemption arc.
Using their native tongue: the internet, Gen Z proselytized the show through memes, clips, and podcasts, and now, as if by collective manifestation, it’s being rebooted for five episodes, which HBO announced Wednesday.
When Girls first aired in 2012, it was cataclysmic. Rave reviews were usurped by the relentless onslaught of sexism and misogyny, which commented on Dunham’s body, the kind of sex depicted onscreen, and the nepo baby allegations against the show’s stars—as well as the series’ lack of diversity. There was endless backlash and backlash to the backlash; it became everyone’s favorite show to both fairly criticize and willfully misunderstand, and creator Dunham was the one stuck grasping onto the lightning rod of so much ire, as she began to stand for everything wrong with millennial white women.
But then something happened. A decade after it aired, everyone started rewatching Girls. It’s not just that people were talking about it online; the series’ viewership doubled between November 2022 and January 2023, compared with the previous three months, The New York Times reported. On Tiktok and Instagram, memes and supercuts started unfurling: Marnie poised with a microphone in the infamous teal dress; Hannah snapping “I am busy, trying to become who I am,” or Shoshanna saying, “Obvi we’re the ladies!” It finally clicked for viewers, spawning a cultural and critical resurgence. While the reviews aged like milk, the show had aged like wine.
It was a phenomenon largely fueled by Gen Z viewers who had missed the show the first time around. (As well as prominent millennial Girls “truthers” like Hunter Harris, Peyton Dix, and Evan Ross Katz.) Among these Gen Z viewers were Amelia Ritthaler and Evan Lazarus, Brooklyn comedians who launched the Girls Rewatch podcast in 2023.
“I think the rest of society caught up to (Dunham),” says Ritthaler, 28. “Everybody was kind of under the impression that they weren’t allowed to be publicly saying that they loved the show and thought it was great. But me and Evan were like, this show is amazing. Why is everybody mad at her?”
Gen Z especially was able to identify with a style that so many millennials had failed to grasp. “So much of what we were raised on was this post-ironic, emotionally removed, ‘world is burning, but let’s dance through it’ kind of social media,’” she says. “I feel like when it was coming out, millennials were just kind of in their earnest era. The millennial optimism of it all. I feel like Gen Z never got that, so we were always watching it from this satirical lens that Lena wrote it in.”
Ritthaler and Lazarus posted Girls memes on TikTok and Instagram, amassing a following that allowed them to have guests like Dunham, as well as cast members Allison Williams (Marnie), Andrew Rannells (Elijah), and Zosia Mamet (Shoshanna) on the show. “I think this was like 70% cuz of you guys,” Jemima Kirke (Jessa) commented on the podcast’s Instagram account the day the revival was announced. “I feel like I loved my favorite show back to my life,” Lazarus said in a teary-eyed video.
The show’s redemption arc coincided with Dunham’s memoir Famesick, published in April, further fueling the Girls nostalgia. “I feel like reading Famesick felt like getting a director’s cut of girls,” says Dix, who hosts the podcast Lemme Say This with Hunter Harris.
The book was an instant New York Times bestseller with a buzzy tour. More importantly, there was a public reckoning around the way culture mistreated Dunham. It felt like a bow tied neatly around the physical and mental toll making Girls. She had moved to London, gotten sober, written extensively about chronic illness, worked on shows like Industry and Too Much. Last month, she announced she’d welcomed a baby via surrogacy.
There were never explicit fan calls for a reboot, particularly after the universally-panned Sex and the City reboot And Just Like That… But the swell in the show’s popularity undoubtedly caught the attention of HBO execs, thanks to the tenacious Gen Zers who spread the good word online. In a Substack post published Wednesday, Dunham credited the fans for helping her be ready to return to the series. “Maybe there was once a part of me that wanted to outrun Hannah and her ladies,” she writes. “Seeing the love you’ve so generously shared for it helped to turn me around.”
“The fans are just tender queers and sensitive girls who journal and heart their eyes,” says Dix. “The people she’s reaching and nurturing aren’t critics anymore, it feels like, or people who want to make weird comments about her body. It’s just young people, she wants to help inform or entertain.”
Part of the reason for the revival is, of course, that everything has come back: Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, iCarly, and countless others have also seen reboots and sequels in recent years. “It’s nostalgia-core for sure,” Ritthaler says. “But it sucks that we don't have any new IP that has topped it. I walk around Brooklyn every day, thinking ‘how did we make Girls in 2012 and then everything went back to being worse?’”
But Gen Z is also ripe for a millennial optimism they never got to experience. Nostalgia for the mid-2010s has been cropping up online, with people posting photos of themselves in 2016, longing for fixed gear bikes, sepia toned photos, and stomp-clap music.
“I think there’s an energy, particularly in New York right now, that really embodies millennial optimism, and I think that Girls is absolutely a part of that cultural conversation,” says Dix. “It falls neatly into this new world we’re building that is kind of based on ‘Obama first-term joy.’ It’s nice to feel joy again when it’s really difficult to find it.”