“Can we still call it Girls? Because we’re old as f….”.
That’s the question, isn’t it? But Girls just wouldn’t be Girls if it was called Women, even if the titular ladies are now in their 30s and 40s.
Girls, Lena Dunham’s seminal HBO comedy about twenty-somethings in New York City in the 2010s, is returning for a limited engagement.
The revival will span five episodes, and the announcement was made in a video which mocked a video call between Dunham and her co-stars, Zosia Mamet, Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke and Andrew Rannells.
Production is due to start next year, although it’s not confirmed whether the broadcast will be in 2027 or the following year.
The series was a breakthrough for Dunham when it premiered in 2012, capturing the adventures of a specific slice of New York’s Brooklyn and the coming-of-age of four, middle-class young women who messed up more than they triumphed.
The show became synonymous with Dunham’s meteoric rise as she was only in her mid-20s when she created the show. A line of dialogue from the first episode, spoken by her character Hannah Horvath, “I think I may be the voice of my generation, or at least the voice of a generation”, came to symbolise the show’s place in the zeitgeist.
As lauded as it was, Girls and Dunham were also divisive, an inevitability when it comes to any female-led project, and a young one at that, which had a strong perspective and attention.
The show ran for six seasons and also launched the careers of Adam Driver and Christopher Abbott. Neither men, nor Alex Karpovsky (Ray) are confirmed to be joining this new chapter.
“We always said we would only return to Girls if there was a specific story we were burning to tell,” Dunham said in a statement.
“I’ve missed these characters, but for a long time, I couldn’t quite picture them in the present day. Then, right around my 40th birthday, they started talking to me in the shower.
“And, as you remember, once this fivesome starts talking, it’s pretty hard to get them to stop. It’s rare that you get the chance to return to something that changed your life with the gift of hindsight and a whole new level of gratitude and understanding.
“I love these girls (and boy), our friends at HBO, and all the people who have continued to discover the show and remind us afresh why we do this, which is the joy of being together, and the chance to wear yellow mesh.”
Dunham recently published her memoirs, Famesick, which detailed some of the dramas behind the scenes of the production, which included a complex relationship between her and Driver.
She wrote that Driver was verbally abusive and once threw a chair towards her on set, but also described a mercurial bond that contained a lot of mutual love including the parting words from him, “I hope you know I’ll always love you”. But she said she never heard from him again after the show.
Asked at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year for his response to Dunham’s memoirs, the famously private Driver quipped, “I’m saving it all for my book”.
While producer Judd Apatow will again work on the series, it seemed unlikely that Jenni Konner, Dunham’s producing partner for several years, will be involved. The two women had a fractious falling-out many years ago some details of which were also covered in Famesick.
Dunham’s memoirs were generous about Williams, Mamet and Kirke, and she and Rannells have remained always close.