The return of “Girls” for a five-episode limited run won’t just be interesting because of how Hannah Horvath has or has not changed. It’ll be a litmus test for how we at home have, as well.
After all, Lena Dunham has at times struggled to distinguish herself from her most famous creation. At the height of HBO’s “Girls,” the op-ed-generating machine that, incidentally, was a very good TV show, journalists wrote about and addressed Dunham as if she literally were the narcissistic writer she portrayed onscreen. A general consensus seemed to have formed that Dunham could not possibly understand the ways in which Horvath was flawed and annoying — despite the fact that Dunham had written her. And, in the years after “Girls” wrapped up in 2017, Dunham struggled to step out of the show’s shadow with new work, in part due to medical and substance issues she documented in her recent memoir “Famesick.”
As proven by “Famesick” and her 2025 Netflix series “Too Much” — a wistful, surprisingly mature story of attempting to move on from romantic disappointment — Dunham is in a different place now, and so, maybe, is her audience. Her book was received with warm nostalgia and appreciation for Dunham’s lacerating understanding of herself and the web of misunderstandings that surround her.
So — while it’s obviously too early even to speculate about what a late-2020s “Girls” might look like, aside from its cast, with Dunham, Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke, Zosia Mamet and Andrew Rannells confirmed to return — there’s hope that it might cut through some of the clutter that came to define the show as it ran on. It’s also reasonable to assume that “Girls” 2 might more fully reflect Dunham’s perspective than did the show we now remember fondly: Part of the tension and drama of “Famesick” is its depiction of “Girls” as the product of a vexed series of compromises with Dunham’s then-creative partner Jenni Konner, brought in to teach the raw writing-directing talent behind the indie film “Tiny Furniture” how to make conventionally structured TV. Judd Apatow returns to this iteration “Girls” as an executive producer, but Konner does not.
The Dunham-Konner breakup — Dunham’s side of which is painstakingly reconstructed in “Famesick” — lends the idea of a “Girls” revival an intriguingly meta aspect. Wherever Hannah is now, she’ll likely be written by a person newly working on her own terms. (Along with co-writers, Dunham is credited as a writer on every episode of “Too Much,” which was not true of the first six seasons of “Girls.”) And the information Dunham has shared about her inner life lends the revival the feeling of a reclamation, as well. Hannah’s ending on the series — isolated from many of her friends and raising a child as a single mother — was, we now know, written at a time when Dunham was physically ill and addicted to drugs. Making the series in what seems to be a happier and stabler moment in her life — including with a new perspective on parenthood, as Dunham, having written about her grief following her hysterectomy, is now a mother — allows the possibility of Hannah finding a deeper, richer ending.
Or… not an ending, but a stopping point. As this news proves once again, nothing in TV is ever really final — does anyone believe, for instance, that we’ll actually never see Carrie Bradshaw again? But the Carrie example gives a sense of the potential, and pitfalls, of a “Girls” revival. It was joyful and heartening for fans of that show to check in with Carrie and her friends on the streets of New York in the 2008 sequel film and 2020s HBO Max revival “And Just Like That.” (I use “streets of New York” advisedly — note that I am avoiding mentioning the words “Abu Dhabi.”) And these new projects allowed Michael Patrick King to test out how the characters of “Sex and the City” might move through passages of life as they grew into late middle age — a genuinely radical project. But as “And Just Like That” ran on, Carrie could at times feel less like the living, breathing person she once had and more like an accumulation of narrative contrivances — back with Aidan, again! — and opportunities to comment on changing social mores.
In all, though, it was invigorating to see Carrie Bradshaw ripped out of her moment and placed into contemporaneity. And Hannah Horvath has similar promise. Since “Girls” ended, she’s been frozen in time — our reactions to her may have shifted, but she remains a creature of the late Obama era, as emblematic of old-millennial mores and ways of speaking as Carrie Bradshaw was of turn-of-the-century Gen X fabulosity. How has Hannah’s perspective shifted since we left her — and what parts of her remain irreducibly herself? Much in the same way that I’ve loved watching Dunham coming into herself in recent years, I can’t wait to find out.