It takes a lot of talent to make something as singular as Girls. Then 26-year-old Lena Dunham created, starred in and executive-produced the show. She frequently directed, and she wrote or co-wrote 41 of the extraordinarily raw, realistic (Girls’ sex scenes reduced most screen and polite conventions to rubble), brutally funny and occasionally simply brutal 62 episodes that comprised its six seasons between 2012 and 2017. Girls’ impeccably witty script and sublime characterisations meant it pulled off a near-impossible feat. It made the story of four solipsistic, privileged twentysomethings navigating their lives one sexual/professional/ youthful/contraceptive mistake at a time in New York City compelling, funny and meaningful. As Dunham’s character and semi-alter ego Hannah Horvath said of herself – she may not have been the voice of a generation, but she was definitely a voice of her generation.
Since then, the output of a woman for whom the word “wunderkind” seemed woefully underpowered has itself been underwhelming. Dunham’s much-hyped first book did not deliver a fraction of the humour or insight Girls proved she was capable of – although certain passages did garner much publicity and controversy, a tradition she then continued with various ill-advised (or wilfully misinterpreted) comments on the #MeToo movement, writing out of imagination rather than lived experience and other hot button issues of the past decade or so. Her US remake of Julia Davis’s Camping was widely considered to have lost its originator’s bleak genius in translation, and Dunham’s adaptation of the beloved and brilliant children’s book Catherine Called Birdy, was an inoffensive bagatelle that did not detain critics or commerce long.
