Spoilers for Girls to follow, but, like, come on. Watch it already!
The X-Files, 30 Rock, Family Guy, Arrested Development, Weeds. At one point in my conscious life or another, I considered each of the aforementioned shows my all-time favorite. I can say now that Girls has earned its rightful place in that pantheon.
When reading Hanya Yanagihara’s most recent novel, To Paradise, I picked up on how she relayed the feeling that a single encounter—with a work of art, with another person, with the natural world—can make you feel both older and younger, somehow more childish and more mature. Girls does that for me. It takes me back to five years ago when I first watched it and transports me to five years from now when I’ll be as old as the protagonists at the show’s end. It makes the world feel specific and universal, rigid and blurred. It contains some of the best writing and acting that has ever graced a screen. It’s amazing!
I have, mostly in jest, referred to Lena Dunham as the greatest auteur of the 2010s. In all honesty, I didn’t even like Tiny Furniture that much and I found Sharp Stick grating. I still think she’s infinitely better than whatever is going on with Sam Levinson, whose complete control over Euphoria has been a notoriously bad idea and whose scripts could’ve used another dozen pairs of eyes before going to print. Nevertheless, Dunham tapped into something particular and powerful with Girls and deserves to be celebrated for her accomplishment in television.
I’m two years out of college, right about where the pilot picks up on the messy and unpredictable life of Hannah Horvath, a young woman whom you never really like but you definitely get. The show follows her and her friends (if, at many points, they can be called that) across six seasons of life (mostly) in New York. Like any person of a certain age in a certain milieu in certain cities of the United States, I see myself in all of the girls for all of the wrong (right?) reasons. Hannah’s frequent non-apologies were singularly painful to watch because I have been guilty of the same stubbornness on plenty of occasions. It wasn’t hard to relate to Jessa’s proclivity for self-destruction through impulse and wanton desire. It was hard to see Shoshanna’s brash approach to manifesting the life of her dreams met with the same harshness by the Universe.
When I first watched the show at seventeen, I connected most with Marnie. I was struck by her neuroticism, perfectionism, and obsessiveness: the way she commandeers Charlie’s party to sing her iconic cover of “Stronger,” her inability to recognize how things meant to be fun become less so when they are meticulously planned, her insistence that her pleasure and comfort are irrelevant to the happiness of the people around her. I especially identified with her tendency toward tenacity — while the other girls flitted through life, Marnie was apt hold on to (or, perhaps, grasp at) a friendship, relationship, artistic pursuit or professional aspiration well past its expiration date, willfully ignorant to the rot that had slowly and completely consumed it. Though I came late to the show, I did catch the series finale as it aired and in the moment that Marnie claims that she “won” because she showed up unannounced at a pregnant Hannah’s home to “help,” I saw every time I felt like I had to prove myself as “the best” at anything and everything flash before my eyes.
Upon embarking on this rewatch, I wondered if I could definitively say what were the “best” or my “favorite” episodes. The first to come to mind were “Beach House” and “Goodbye Tour,” each culminating in scenes where Shoshanna, the show’s sleeper-hit voice of reason alongside the consistently and painfully rational Ray, expertly diagnoses the issues within their group: Hannah is too self-centered, Marnie is too controlling, Jessa is too unreliable, their dynamic is too poisonous to last.
In the former episode, Shoshanna proclaims that she is “so fucking sick” of her fellow girls. In the latter, she deems their group dynamic “exhausting” and “boring.” They are the quintessential episodes of the series, humorously depicting what it means to be honest with yourself and your friends in the face of frustration and resentment. Thankfully, they both end on a hopeful note that doesn’t feel unearned. Bonds between the girls feel less tenuous; they are less victims of circumstance than people who feel a genuine, if not immediately apparent, affection for one another. This hope is communicated such that you truly believe the protagonists are growing up, despite all evidence to the contrary.
An under-discussed episode that deserves a revisit from any fan of the show is “Dead Inside” from the third season. It has everything: the untimely death of Hannah’s editor, David Pressler-Goings (an all-time great character name), a Rocky-esque sequence of Marnie exercising set to “Bitter Rivals” by Sleigh Bells (in addition to clips from her “What I Am” video), Jessa’s discovery that a friend who she thought passed away had actually faked her death to get out of their toxic, drug-addled friendship. It primarily features Hannah being more concerned with the future of her e-book than with the life of a man who died under mysterious circumstances, which perturbs Adam and Ray. As we reach the end of a day defined by Hannah’s myopia, Caroline spins a convincing yarn about a deceased cousin with muscular dystrophy. Hannah doesn’t even shed a tear — she just probes about the size of the imaginary cousin’s dress. In an attempt to garner sympathy from Adam, she uses that same lie at the end of the episode. It’s Hannah at her absolute worst: a proud, mendacious narcissist. It’s grotesque. It’s marvelous. It’s Girls.
During this most recent venture into the twisted mind of Lena Dunham, I find most remarkable how few times all of the girls are actually in the same room across sixty-two episodes (a scant twelve times, according to IMDb) and how jarring it is when they are forced to confront how little they actually know about each other. This is an unfortunately accurate illustration of “adult” friendships where presence in each other’s life waxes and wanes, becoming ever more complicated by work, romance, distance and the omnipresent fear that the course you’ve set yourself on is actually headed into one of those fake tunnels Wile E. Coyote paints on a rock to fool the Road Runner.
At twenty-three, you assume that at least a couple of the friends you currently have are going to be your friends for the rest of your life. You’ve seen them graduate, earn promotions, move to new apartments and cities, date awful people, date wonderful people. You think that you will attend their weddings, meet their children, use words that don’t currently exist in conversations that you can’t even conceive. Yet, sometimes through no fault of your own and sometimes for reasons completely of your own doing, those friendships change. It’s horrific to imagine that there will come a time when the people with whom you’ve shared the most intimate details of your life serve a different purpose than they do now. It’s even worse to imagine that they won’t be in your life at all.
Last week, I tweeted about an exchange between Hannah and her then-soon-to-be boyfriend Fran that captured a core tenet of the show: we are often completely wrong about ourselves and the way other people see us is often exactly the way we are. It’s why the close relationships we build as we emerge into adulthood are some of the most potent and beautiful we ever experience — the people who gravitate to us see our goodness, confidence, loyalty and other qualities we invariably ignore. The people meant to be in our lives stay, not out of some perverse obligation but the desire to be known as they know us.
In “Goodbye Tour,” the penultimate episode of the series, Shoshanna refers to the people who comprise her new friend group as girls who have “jobs and purses and nice personalities” and you can feel yourself running back every scene where a reckless decision made by one or more of the girls brought any and all progress they had made toward a goal—to go back to school, to get and keep a job, to get and stay married—to a grinding halt. After a tense moment in the bathroom and a tearful reconciliation between Hannah and Jessa, the girls decide to get into the “cool metropolitan vibe” of the engagement party and let go of the judgments previously lodged against one another. Marnie hands out her business cards, Shoshanna embraces her fiancé, “How Do We Get Back To Love” by Julia Michaels transitions into “Crowded Places” by BANKS. The show cuts between shots of the party through a window and a sequence of Hannah moving into her new house upstate and it wrecks me every time. In the half-hour world of Girls, everything constantly feels as if it’s about to collapse in on itself, the entropy of friendship becoming too much for the Earth to handle. At its best, the show becomes almost unbearable to watch, but then they release their anger and fear and move their bodies together, toward something new. Even when the girls were at war, they kept dancing.
If you’d like to read more of my thoughts on television, film, music, internet culture, my life, what have you, please join my mailing list and share this article with friends! As to my previous point about auteurs, I actually consider Sean Baker and Kelly Reichardt to be the most exciting American writer-directors to hit their stride in the last decade and I hope to write about their work soon. I was inspired to come back to Girls after my Sex and the City binge last year and I will definitely write about that franchise — I love it dearly, in spite of the bad first film, disastrous second film, and largely abhorrent installation of And Just Like That…
I’m also currently writing a short piece of fiction that I will likely publish here. You’ll have to subscribe and see!
If you made it this far, here are my honorable mentions for the greatest episodes of Girls:
“One Man’s Trash,” “The Panic in Central Park,” and “American Bitch” — I love a bottle episode! Sue me!
“Wedding Day” for Marnie’s hilariously bad makeup and for getting all of the show’s boys together — Adam and Fran’s inability to complete a sentence around each other is funny every time and the pond scene between Ray and Desi is just exquisite.
“Leave Me Alone” and “Love Stories” for Outstanding Jenny Slate in a Comedy Series
“Welcome to Bushwick a.k.a. The Crackcident” because of, well, everything
All three episodes of Hannah’s Iowa arc are excellent critiques of academia, but “Female Author” is the stand-out episode for the “tragically hip gaysian” line and surrounding roast of her obnoxious peers (side note: I could not have been happier to see Desiree Akhavan as one of Hannah’s classmates. You need to watch her wonderful Girls-adjacent debut feature Appropriate Behavior if you haven’t yet.)
“Gummies” for making me feel vicariously high through Loreen
“Full Disclosure” for Rita Wilson’s scatting and the early version of “Honey” by Robyn, both of which still bring me to tears
Probably the most enjoyable read I’ve had in a while, especially to do with my fav show as well. YOU’RE TOO LOVED JAROD I can’t wait for more!
"The people meant to be in our lives stay, not out of some perverse obligation but the desire to be known as they know us." pitted.