The Girls are back in town. By now, every self-respecting millennial in the world must surely have heard the news: Lena Dunham’s era-defining HBO drama will return for a limited five-episode revival series, which will resume the story 10 years after the show’s 2017 finale.
Since the news of the reboot was announced by HBO on Instagram, I’ve received so many messages that it almost feels like I just hard-launched my engagement. And of course I’m excited: Girls was the first show I’d ever seen satirize the try-hard, high-cringe reality of millennial life, while also capturing the type of awkward, clumsy, weird sex we were having. But amidst the visible glee from fans, there’s also a fear that I sense among even the most ardent Dunham devotees. As one of my friends succinctly put it, “I’m so excited, but I hope she doesn’t ruin it.”
Right now, reboots, sequels, prequels, remakes, and revivals dominate the content landscape. It’s often said that audiences are suffering from reboot “fatigue,” but observing the reaction to Girls 2.0, I’d say it’s closer to reboot trauma. After so many reprisals that have woefully missed the mark, there’s a level of cultural PTSD that is triggered in moments like this. It’s making the Girls revival feel remarkably high-stakes.
Reboots contain a strange contradiction: As much as audiences now are wary of them, they also come with an undeniable air of prestige. At a time when we’re inundated with content across so many different platforms, a reboot is the official stamp of approval that a film or show is iconic. It’s become the ultimate cultural flex.
There is a long list of reboots, prequels, and sequels that are distinctly meh, from Amazon Prime’s Legally Blonde prequel Elle to the (eye-wateringly expensive) Rings of Power, not to mention Disney’s mission to fill the galaxy with as many Star Wars films and spinoffs as possible. Some reboots soften the hard edges of the original. Gossip Girl and Mean Girls both came back as kinder, gentler versions of themselves, but some of the fun was gone. Then there’s the one franchise that, especially for fans of Girls, is more triggering than any other: Sex and the City.
And Just Like That…, the 2021 reboot series created by Michael Patrick King, is perhaps the ultimate cautionary tale here. You’d be hard-pressed to find a SATC fan who would argue that the show, which took us back into the world of SATC’s Manolo-loving antiheroine Carrie Bradshaw in her 50s, didn’t tarnish the original’s legacy. There are many problems with AJLT, not least (trigger warning) Che Diaz. But the core issue was that it seemed more concerned with apologizing for the franchise’s past—in particular, a lack of diversity and social awareness—than telling an honest story. Characters like the once-unflinching Miranda Hobbes were now fearful of the audience, as if they’d been cryogenically frozen for two decades and were suddenly thawed into a “woke 1.0” world of pronouns and podcasts. AJLT lost so much of the razor-sharp cynicism that made the original work, somehow pulling off the remarkable feat of being both patronizing to 50-something women and offensively tokenistic toward the new characters.
