There is one TV show that has been enjoyed most often, and most reliably, among my cohort in New York: Girls, the seminal HBO dramedy about Brooklyn’s downwardly mobile and highly self-important creative class of the 2010s. Though a cultural lightning rod when it aired from 2012 until 2017 – its whiteness, convincing narcissism, frank sexuality and frequent nudity all catnip for the cresting blogosphere and cyclical moral panic – Girls has rightfully settled into its status as one of the best television series of the 21st century, a foundational text for millennials as well as a biting satire of solipsistic, Obama-era striving. (Although viewers too young to remember it as anything other than canon now see the girls’ flailing – their freedom to wear terrible prints, listen to Vampire Weekend and be earnest – as something to be envied rather than derided, a core tenet of the millennial redemption arc.)
The show was always sharper than tendentious criticism acknowledged, a knowing send-up not to be taken too seriously, though it did seriously shape the TV that followed – the idea of an “unlikable” female protagonist was always ahistorical, but messy, compelling women on television proliferated in Hannah Horvath’s wake, from the girls of Broad City to Insecure’s Issa, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag to Pamela Adlon’s Better Things. It is unfortunately still radical to see someone who looks like creator, writer and star Lena Dunham be naked on screen without judgment; though television has explored sex much more successfully than movies in the years since, no show has fully succeeded Girls’ unvarnished vision of sex as something both banal and essential. No wonder so many people are rewatching it.
