You know a cultural moment has some cut-through when it gets its own satirical headline on The Betoota Advocate: “Millennial Woman’s Phone Melts As 25 Group Chats Light Up About Girls Revival”. This was in response to last week’s announcement post from HBO showing Girls creator Lena Dunham and her cast mates jumping on a casual video call to arrange a fun summer project: five new episodes of a limited revival, checking back in with Hannah (Dunham), Marnie (Allison Williams), Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) and Jessa (Jemima Kirke) as they stare down the big 4-0.
Andrew Rannells – a Broadway stalwart who played Hannah’s college boyfriend Elijah – is also on board and featured in the announcement video, but that’s all the detail we have for now.
For some fans, the big questions might be around cast members we didn’t see. Adam Driver – whose breakout role was as Hannah’s main love interest, also named Adam – has in the intervening years become one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. He’s worked with Francis Ford Coppola and Jim Jarmusch, had major billing as Kylo Ren in the Star Wars sequel series, and is now slated to join the Marvel Cinematic Universe as X-Men villain Mr Sinister.
He’s not the only Girls boy whose stock has risen so high. Christopher Abbott – a soulful actor who played Marnie’s college boyfriend Charlie – was recently announced alongside Driver as the MCU’s new Charles “Professor X” Xavier.
Both the real and fictional Adams will cast a tall, odd shadow over the revival whether he figures in the story or not – Dunham has since written of erratic on-set behaviour from Driver, whose only public response has been a dry “I have no comment”. For Abbott, though, I actually hope his shooting schedule keeps him away, as his brief return in the fifth and final season made for one of the show’s best episodes, and checking in with Charlie again would be a hat on another, more perfect hat.
As with the other major revival of the last decade, Sex and the City’s much-disparaged (and hate-watched) And Just Like That..., we can probably expect months of breathless casting and cameo announcements, often impossible to keep secret while filming on the streets of NYC. Between the HBO pedigree, the Judd Apatow co-sign and Dunham’s finely tuned writing, original-flavour Girls never struggled to attract your favourite actors’ favourite actors; anyone from Natasha Lyonne or Donald Glover to Ben Mendelsohn or Patti LuPone might pop in to be a one-episode wonder.
Peter Scolari, who played Hannah’s closeted father Tad, sadly died of leukemia in 2021, but I hope to see Becky Ann Baker gunning for an overdue guest-star Emmy as Loreen Horvath, a phenomenally underrated, complex and funny TV mother.
Given Girls existed explicitly as a loving, realist rebuke to SATC’s glam fantasy fulfilment, it’s also a subtle flex to have all three of Dunham’s original co-leads look into their webcams and say “I’m in” as though agreeing to participate in an elaborate heist – particularly Kirke, who I had always assumed would be the Kim Cattrall of any future revival.
Always coded as the enigmatic, self-possessed Samantha analogue to the others’ various flavours of girlypop neurosis, Jessa seemed by some margin the least likely to still be in their orbit. She was also heavily based on Kirke, Dunham’s close childhood friend of nearly two decades, and the actor playing a bizarro version of herself as written by Dunham reportedly strained their relationships at times.
Occasionally appearing in shows including Sex Education and Conversations with Friends, she has remained a fascinating figure, radiating arch and impossibly chic detachment. In 2022, a screenshot of her Instagram story became a meme and foundational online text of sorts; in reply to a Q&A asking for “advice for unconfident young women”, she replied with an impassive selfie and the not-unkind reproach “I think you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much”.
A quote from Cattrall similarly entered the extremely-online lexicon a few years earlier via a Guardian headline many saw as none-too-subtly referencing her absence from AJLT: “I don’t want to be in a situation for even an hour where I’m not enjoying myself.” These two quotes exist in a sort of quantum entanglement on my slice of the internet, paired by the women who said them and the characters they played, their crystalline, effortless truthiness and the tantalising promise that you too can opt out of the traps of self-involvement disguised as self-awareness and compulsive people-pleasing.
Like Dunham, I also turned 40 this year, and with each birthday that carries me further from my tortured girlhood, more of these traps become obvious and avoidable, even as I know new ones lie hidden ahead of me. Of course, just because you can avoid them, doesn’t mean you will. Gen Z viewers have, notably, embraced Girls in all its millennial cringe and millennial optimism, recoloured the post-GFC hipster flailing with the rosy lenses of romanticised eras, and I hope this revival will help humanise us further as we flail into middle age.
Your 40s, Dunham wrote in her Substack about the revival, can see you landing just about anywhere: “There have been 40th birthdays thrown at vineyards and 40th birthday raves. Your parents can be 60 or 90, alive or dead, ailing or lifting kettlebells … Your kids can be heading to college or not yet born.”
‘[Girls] is a mirror: honest, uninterested in reassuring flattery and sometimes harrowing to look at.’
The original series ended with a baby, an engagement, a divorce and a sort-of commitment between the main cast, but no sense of “happy ever after” or closure whatsoever. There is a distinct sense that these characters have been out there this whole time, living lives rich in entropy and self-sabotage, in the same real-life New York streets that have been variously lined with refrigerated morgue trucks, protests supporting #MeToo and Palestine, Mamdani canvassers, overjoyed Knicks fans. (It is entirely possible that Jessa impulsively moved to Freo in January 2020 and lived a largely COVID-oblivious existence.)
As personal a piece of work as Girls has always been, it will give Dunham the opportunity to continue to create separation in her public image between herself and the gauche, funny, bombastic Hannah. She has unpacked plenty of autobiographical elements recently, including a major breakup, in her memoir Famesick and her Netflix-series-a-clef Too Much; reflected publicly on her own mistakes as a mouthy 20-something prestige-TV auteur; and worked on her craft (she directed, among others, arguably the best TV pilot of the decade, the heart-stopping first episode of Industry).
While her character’s own son will be hitting double digits in the revival, Dunham had a hysterectomy at 31 and a baby daughter born via surrogate this year. Her first “baby” is well into its teen years, yet still in conversation with its original context and ongoing legacy. That Girls keeps finding new fans, being reevaluated and rediscovered, is proof that it was always a rich text.
Dunham may or may not be the voice of her generation (a tongue-in-cheek Hannahism that will follow her forever like an earnest proclamation) but her creation is a mirror: honest, uninterested in reassuring flattery and sometimes harrowing to look at if you’re unused to accepting your own flaws.
Whatever lies between us and the premiere of Girls 2.0 (or should that be 4.0?), fans clearly trust the show’s wit, wisdom and generosity of spirit to keep us company as we all keep trying to become who we are.
Girls is streaming on HBO Max. The revival goes into production in 2027.
Want more TV? We’ve got you.
- Newsletter: Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.
- Movie guide: More than 200 hand-picked hits from all the major streamers.
- October streaming picks: A guide to the best new shows this month.
- Sam Pang returns: What did the most popular man on TV do after winning the Gold Logie? Get back to work.
- Killer gnomes: Inside the making of this “unhinged” Australian comedy.
- A field guide to Nathan Fielder: What to watch while you wait for You Can See Everything, “the movie of the year”.
- Watch (below): Deputy TV editor Meg Watson recommends Dustfall, the incredible new ABC drama you should be watching.