Lena Dunham is considering a reboot of her cult hit show Girls, which has enjoyed a Gen Z renaissance in recent years.
Speaking to journalist Richard Rushfield on The Ankler’s Substack Live, The Rushfield Lunch, Dunham weighed in on a possible Girls revival and how the HBO hit, a millennial period piece chronicling the lives of four young women in New York City, has aged in a post-Obama zeitgeist.
“We haven’t had a conversation about a reunion only because we always said when the show ended that if we were going to go back, it would have to be at such a different phase in their lives. Let’s check in when they’re 60,” Dunham told Rushfield during the Wednesday broadcast. “Let’s check in when they’re not at Sex and the City age, they’ve taken even another leap. Part of the goal of the show was always to lean into what was unexpected, so we want to be unexpected if we come together again.”
Dunham also argued that it’s “almost impossible” to imagine Girls taking place in the present day as a core of the show’s thematic arc relied on the political and cultural tone-deafness of its lead characters—four white girls with rich parents living in gentrified Brooklyn.
“I feel like in a world after Me Too, in a world after the summer of 2020 uprisings and the conversation that existed in America around race, the conversations that are happening around gender, that so much of the confusion and ignorance that the characters exhibited—which was a part of their story—would be almost impossible for people who lived in Brooklyn and were plugged into the world to really exhibit,” Dunham said.
Although the comedy-drama is currently in the midst of a cultural victory lap, at the time of its release, it consistently was at the epicenter of backlash (which inspired even more backlash to the backlash) exacerbated by the controversy surrounding Dunham in real life. Vulture even published a 1,500 word list of all the show’s controversies in 2017, ranging from the inherent privilege of its characters and its predominant white cast to Dunham’s body—which perhaps spurred some of the most deafening discourse on the show.
“It’s hard to imagine the show having more blowback than the show had because it had probably the maximum amount of blowback that a show with that number of viewers can experience,” Dunham recalled of the criticism around Girls. “It was like 800 times the blowback of the viewership. I feel like we had blowback from people who weren’t even watching the show; they were just wanting to join in a little bit of an internet party.”
Dunham said one thing that she was able to pinpoint from Girls’ online hate train in the early 2010s, however, was the beginning of the MAGA movement before it had fully formed under President Donald Trump.
“It’s fascinating because when MAGA culture really started to emerge clearly, I remember certain friends of mine being so shocked by the way that certain people spoke or thought,” Dunham said. “It was a surprise to them, and having been online in the early days of Girls, it wasn’t a surprise to me because there were those voices, they just hadn’t created a larger umbrella of identification over themselves.”
She added, “So, they were always there and I always knew they were thinking very differently than our audience was, and never the twain shall meet. But I didn’t have a word for what they were.”
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