‘Why is everyone struggling in New York?” Hannah Hovarth asks in season one of HBO’s coming-of-age comedy-drama Girls. Back in 2012, it was a question that – to fans and the many journalists who gave the show rave reviews – felt very fresh. Lena Dunham’s look at the trials and tribulations that come with adulthood in the Big Apple – which launched 10 years ago today – wasn’t the first of its kind. But while shows such as Sex and the City – and its all-Black counterpart Girlfriends – had explored similar ground 10 years earlier, there was something about Girls that felt different.
“If Sex in the City is the celebration of a post-90s feminism that celebrates money, consumption, sex and over-the-top feminity, Girls is the rejection of that,” says Jorie Lagerwey, professor of English, drama and film at University College Dublin and author of Horrible White People; Gender, Genre and Television’s Precarious Whiteness. It was an unflinching portrayal of millennial life that sought to uncover what lay beneath the veneer of the American dream. The recession of 2008 betrayed a generation of people and so, where Carrie Bradshaw masked her romantic issues with copious cocktails and $500 Manolo Blahniks, Dunham chose a more radical approach by foregoing masks all together. It embraced the warts-and-all truths of a specific generation of women.
In the opening episode, we saw Dunham’s character of Hannah – a budding writer in between unpaid internships – on the point of getting cut off from her parents, despite believing herself to be the “voice of a generation”. It’s one of the many pieces of whip-smart cringe comedy, delusions of grandeur and intensity that litter the show. You aren’t supposed to like these ladies, but you are supposed to see the worst parts of you in them. After years of only men being allowed to be flawed, churlish protagonists – Tony Soprano and Walter White spring to mind – having four Girls in this realm felt revolutionary. “It was a watershed moment,” says Lagerwey. “Women got to be gross, unlikable and miserable and mean to each other.”
Or at least a very specific demographic of women did. One of the key objections that came to be levelled at Girls is that Dunham’s New York was essentially monoethnic – save for a few Black and brown people who played bit roles as service industry workers. Where white women felt seen, other women found the show uncomfortably blinkered. As people explored Dunham’s career, they found that she was the child of well-connected members of New York’s liberal elite – artists Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham – and came to see the show’s story as one of privilege, wealth and nepotism.
“I remember being very angry,” says Zeba Blay, author of Carefree Black Girls – so angry, she even started a podcast to address it. She wasn’t alone. There was a growing prominent chorus of women of colour who went on Twitter to air their grievances of being ignored and overlooked.
This provoked heated reactions from those who championed the show as a revolutionary force for alternative present-day white feminism. Liz Arfin, a writer on the first season of the show, sarcastically tweeted (but has since deleted the post): “What really bothered me most about [the movie] Precious was that there was no representation of ME.” One infamous Twitter spat involved Caitlin Moran. “Did you address the complete and utter lack of people of colour in Girls in your interview? I sure hope so,” said one tweeter to Moran, who had interviewed Dunham. “Nope and I couldn’t give a shit about it!” she replied in a tweet that has also been deleted.
One of the things that worked against Girls was its timing, given that it came at a precarious time for race relations. It aired two months after the murder of Trayvon Martin in February of that year – a tragedy that brought racial tensions in the US into sharper focus, leading to an increase in people exploring how whiteness presented in all aspects of life. In that context, Girls felt to some like an unabashed display of white privilege that was too much to stomach. As a result, it became one of the first intellectual playgrounds of cultural criticism of its kind. As Lagerwey points out: “2012 was the beginning of serious discussions about visibility and intersectionality.”
To look back on the show is to be confronted by an important time capsule. In many ways, its central characters of Hannah, Jessa, Marnie and Shoshanna are young “Karens” in the making – before we had a catch-all name for that kind of white woman. They might consider themselves to be upstanding socially liberal young women, changing the fabric of society simply by their existence, but they are utterly entitled people who utilise their privilege for personal gain. The self-awareness that Dunham’s script shows in terms of other facets of these characters’ awfulness suggests there is knowingness at work here. But it nonetheless serves as a period snapshot of the unthinking clumsiness of white privilege and its pervasive nature. “Girls – like Sex and the City – is a genuinely fascinating portrait of a moment in time that will never exist again,” says Blay.
With the benefit of hindsight, there is also another question worth asking: would it even have been a good idea for Dunham to write from a Black or ethnic minority perspective? Some commentators think not.
“In retrospect, there’s nothing worse than a white writer who tries to write Black characters, and doesn’t have the range to truly understand them,” says Blay. “It always feels as if they’re projecting their interpretations of race on them.” Dunham writing Donald Glover into season two as her Black Republican boyfriend – and the accusations of being a ham-fisted attempt at diversity it caused – is a good example.
Looking back 10 years later, it’s hard not to wonder whether the conversation that erupted around the lack of diversity in Girls has also had an important long-term consequence: putting diversity at the forefront of discussion on TV. The critique of the series’ whiteness started a public conversation that continues to this day, one that has helped to carve out space for diverse storytelling, given the increase in shows that gave voice to non-white creators that followed. While Girls shouldn’t be credited for their success, the debate it prompted may have helped the likes of Issa Rae’s Insecure and Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You make it to TV.
Had the show been called White Girls, perhaps Dunham would have been able to control the narrative surrounding the show much sooner and it’s been intimated that that these characters living extremely non-diverse lives in one of the world’s most diverse cities was a deliberate way of making them seem dreadful. But, as show creator Jenny Konner stated, she was blindsided by the severity of the criticism. “I knew [the lack of diversity] would be an issue, but I didn’t think the criticism would be at the level it was,” she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017. “Or that the conversation about race would turn into a conversation about racism,” added Dunham.
To Dunham’s credit, her perspectives on race developed off screen over the years – even if it did take multiple controversies and apology cycles to get there – and she appeared to mirror her changing outlooks on screen too. As the show reached its final season, there was a tone of self-awareness that had been missing in the show’s earlier seasons. As Shoshanna says in season six, when she abruptly breaks away from her friends: “We cannot be in the same room without one of us making it completely and entirely about ourselves.”
It’s just one of many moments of brilliance that Girls was littered with. Take the polarising, but defining episode One Man’s Trash episode in season 2, where Hannah embarks on a weekend long affair with a recently separated, older doctor played by Patrick Wilson. Or the season six episode American Bitch, which tackled sexual harrasment. Time rightfully called the episode “groundbreaking” adding “For better or worse, Girls is still like nothing else on television.”
And, it’s worth noting one sad consequence of the debate around the series’ depiction of ethnicity: it will have robbed many potential viewers of the joy of Girls’ best moments. It hasn’t escaped Blay that lots of those who criticised the show never watched it – having been put off by the negativity surrounding it. “It’s a shame,” she says. “Because there are seasons and episodes of that show that are truly brilliant.” Ironically, in the end, Girls was overshadowed, off screen, by the exact thing it was cleverly exploring: self-centredness.
• This article was amended on 15 April 2022. The fourth main female character in Girls is called Shoshanna, not Jemima; and Lena Dunham’s parents are artists, not art curators.
