When Girls premiered in 2012, I was a twentysomething living in New York City, fresh out of college and making my own questionable decisions. So were Hannah (series creator and co-writer Lena Dunham), Marnie (Allison Williams), Jessa (Jemima Kirke), and Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet). I spent six seasons watching them make terrible choices, occasionally recognizing myself in their worst impulses, and even recapping their misadventures for a living.
Nearly 15 years later, HBO is bringing Girls back for a limited, five-episode run with Lena Dunham at the helm. All four titular girls are reprising their roles. I'm older, presumably wiser, and still deeply invested in whether Patrick Wilson's hot doctor is single.
The original series captured a very specific moment in millennial adulthood, when your career was perpetually on the verge of taking off, and every bad decision could be rationalized as a formative experience. Hannah famously declared that she might be "the voice of a generation," or at least a voice of a generation. At the time, the line was both ridiculous and painfully recognizable.
But a lot has changed since we last saw these women in 2017. Our friendships look different. Some of the people who once seemed destined to be in our lives forever are now complete strangers. And the internet, which was already shaping how we lived and understood ourselves, has become an even more inescapable part of everyday life.
Which raises some very important questions. Is Jessa an anti-vaxxer? Does Marnie have a podcast? Has Hannah been publicly shamed on TikTok? Is Shoshanna the terrifyingly successful girlboss she was always destined to become? And do any of them even talk to each other anymore?
I don't necessarily need these women to have figured everything out. In fact, I hope they haven't. Part of what made Girls so compelling was how spectacularly messy, selfish, and insufferable its characters could be. I just want to know what that particular brand of chaos looks like with another decade of life experience.
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So, as someone who grew up alongside the girls (and spent an embarrassing amount of time thinking about their lives), here's a list of very specific things I want to see in the Girls revival.
1. The return of Joshua (Patrick Wilson), the hot doctor. Is he still single? Does he still live in that gorgeous Brooklyn brownstone? Because I, for one, have never forgotten that kitchen.
2. Jessa as an anti-vaxxer and wellness grifter. She's drinking raw milk, selling overpriced tinctures, and scamming women with healing retreats in the Hudson Valley. She calls herself a certified trauma healer, but nobody knows who certified her.
3. Marnie as a divorced mommy influencer with a podcast. Her Instagram is full of beige interiors, inspirational captions, and sponsored posts about gut health. Her podcast is called Becoming Marnie, and she still occasionally releases music.
4. Shoshanna as a successful startup founder. She's built a multimillion-dollar wellness empire, has a Forbes profile, and uses phrases like "circle back" in casual conversation. She's also the only one who actually knows how to use LinkedIn.
5. Hannah accidentally becoming a viral TikTok villain. She publishes a deeply personal essay about her son, only to discover that the internet thinks she's a terrible mother. Her Notes app apology somehow makes everything worse.
6. An update on Caroline (Gaby Hoffmann), Laird (Jon Glaser), and their daughter, Sample. Is Sample being raised in a Brooklyn commune? Is Caroline a homeschooling influencer? And is Laird still wearing that beanie?
7. Elijah (Andrew Rannells) as a gay elder on Fire Island. He's a moderately successful Broadway actor who complains that young gay men don't know their history. He also has a 26-year-old boyfriend and an extremely active Instagram Close Friends story.
8. Ray (Alex Karpovsky) is running for local office. His campaign platform includes protecting independent coffee shops, fighting corporate landlords, and banning TikTokkers from filming in public.
9. Marnie discovers her mother has become more successful on social media than she is. Evie (Rita Wilson) has a thriving TikTok account where she gives dating advice to divorced women. Marnie is horrified to discover that her mother's followers think she's the emotionally stable one.
10. A humiliating encounter with Gen Z twentysomethings. Hannah tries to bond with a group of younger women at a Williamsburg bar, only to discover they think millennials are cringe. One of them calls her "mother," and she takes it literally.
11. Desi (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) as a men's spirituality influencer. He hosts a podcast about divine masculinity, sells expensive breathwork courses, and has definitely participated in an ayahuasca retreat. His Instagram bio includes the word "consciousness."
12. A reckoning with getting older in New York City. Their favorite bars have closed, their old apartments cost three times as much, and the neighborhoods they once called home are barely recognizable. Nothing makes you feel older than realizing you're no longer the target demographic of Williamsburg.
13. Mimi-Rose Howard (Gillian Jacobs) becoming a successful AI artist. Of course she's embraced generative AI as the next frontier of conceptual art. Hannah finds this morally reprehensible, mostly because Mimi-Rose is getting profiled in The New Yorker.
14. Marnie's wedding makeup tutorial resurfacing as a TikTok meme. A new generation discovers her disastrous wedding look and turns it into a viral trend. Marnie tries to reclaim the moment with a sponsored GRWM video.
15. Hannah getting an adult ADHD diagnosis. She immediately writes a 5,000-word essay about how it explains every decision she's ever made. She also starts a Substack about neurodivergence, which she abandons after three posts.
16. Booth Jonathan (Jorma Taccone) as a bankrupt NFT guy. His latest art installation involves blockchain technology, a members-only Discord, and a collection of digital assets that have lost 98 percent of their value. He still insists he's a visionary, but he's really just a fraud.
17. Dan Levy as Hannah's increasingly exasperated literary agent. He's spent the last decade trying to get Hannah to finish her book, which she insists is actually three different books. He keeps suggesting she write a commercial memoir about motherhood, but Hannah considers that beneath her. She's also convinced he's giving all his attention to a 24-year-old BookTok sensation.
18. Andrew Scott as Hannah's literary rival-turned-lover. He's an acclaimed Irish novelist teaching at Hannah's university. His books are universally praised for their emotional honesty, which Hannah finds infuriating because she believes she invented writing about herself.