If you’ve spent any time lately in a coffee shop or doom-scrolling on social media, you’ve probably heard the phrase, “I’m rewatching Girls.” The 2012 HBO series is having a seemingly universal resurgence for no apparent reason. Allison Williams could be responsible for this, since her role in M3GAN revived the infamous clip of her Girls character Marnie performing a ballad rendition of Kanye West’s “Stronger” in Season 2. Perhaps it’s because creator Lena Dunham released two movies in 2022, Sharp Stick and Catherine Called Birdy, after a long hiatus. Maybe it’s because a pivotal scene in the Season 3 episode “Beach House” has been making its rounds on Twitter. It either introduced people to or reminded them of the brilliant writing (and Zosia Mamet’s line delivery as Shoshanna saying, “I’m unstimulating? What do I want to be, like you? Like mentally ill and miserable?”). There’s no solid rhyme or reason why this show that premiered over a decade ago is trending again, but it seems like it is finally being understood the way it was supposed to be.
‘Girls’ Used to Have a Lot of Critics
During Girls’ original run in the early to mid-2010s, the show was considered polarizing by the media and its weekly viewers. While much of the criticism was deeply rooted in misogyny, many of the concerns were valid. A common take was that the four lead characters were so individually insufferable and narcissistic that it was unwatchable. Another is that it was just watching white feminists take advantage of their privilege. Both statements are true, and that was the point. The titular girls are not great people, but what twenty-something is?
The same millennials who watched the show a decade ago are revisiting it now, and hindsight has revealed an entirely new lens. The flawed, self-centered, and often egregious characters are why the show works and strikes a chord with so many. This may not have clicked in the past because identifying with characters like ourselves can be a tough pill to swallow. A spirited, newly-of-age 21-year-old does not want to recognize themselves in Marnie — or, God-forbid, Hannah. But a hardened 30-year-old can now admit that there’s a little bit of every character inside them.
Everyone Hates Hannah
Dunham’s character was initially the most disliked person on the show. There were think-pieces and essays published detailing why Hannah Horvath was the worst. After the pilot episode, Hannah was forever associated with her line, “I think I may be the voice of my generation.” That declaration of self-importance carried throughout the series, with Hannah consistently acting out in an obliviously irritating way. What viewers have noticed now that didn’t always land back then is how Hannah is the butt of the joke. She’s supposed to be off-putting and sometimes say the wrong thing because she’s depicting the reality of being a person who’s still growing. Thanks to newer shows like Fleabag, Russian Doll, and Insecure, it’s easier to digest the crazy notion of a real-life human woman making mistakes.
Marnie Is the Moment
The niche caricature of Marnie Michaels is another factor of why Girls hits so differently today. For someone who is so cringe-worthy to watch, she is also the easiest to recognize in the real world. She’s the poster child for a garden variety millennial. She believed she was the next big singer-songwriter and insisted on wearing a flower crown at her wedding. She is everyone you’ve ever been friends with on Facebook. The initial audience labeled Marnie as uptight, delusional, and blindly self-serving. She was certainly all those things, but upon a rewatch, her unbearable-ness made her the funniest character. After five seasons of delivering memorable moments, Marnie finally got a stand-alone episode that will go down as one of the series’ best with “The Panic in Central Park.” It was episodes like that, the ones that escaped from everyday cattiness and first-world problems, that proved the level of genius Girls operated on.
Shoshanna Can Do No Wrong
From when the show first aired to now, the character of Shoshanna Shapiro has always been rightfully understood. Because she authentically presents as a cartoonish, fast-talking eccentric, the quirks of her personality are easier to accept at face value. Anything to dislike about her is blatantly laid out upon introduction, with no subtlety detected. Though she starts off as more of a tag-along, Shosh’s character arc is the most universal as she struggles to find her personal and professional identity post-college. Along with her endless pop-culture references, she has some of the most endearingly relatable lines like, “My littlest baggage would probably be my IBS, and my medium baggage would be that I truly don’t love my grandmother.” As the seasons go on, Shoshanna becomes a vessel for the average Girls watcher. Like in the aforementioned episode “Beach House,” she finally calls out the other girls for their hypocritical and toxic behavior.
Jessa Is Impossible to Define
Even the character that’s supposed to be an enigma has found a connection with Girls viewers. Jessa Johansson (Jemima Kirke) can’t be defined because she is many things at once. On the surface, she’s a prototypical free-spirited Bohemian. A little deeper, and she is a walking parody of the unemployed and lazy Gen-Xer. But at the core, Jessa is the character that everyone wishes they could be. She acts on her most insane and taboo impulses, delivers the most brutally accurate insults, and looks effervescent while doing it. In her moments of weakness, like reuniting with her father or falling in love with Adam, the real human in Jessa shines through and wins over the audience.
Despite how different all four main characters are from each other, one thing they have in common is that they literally are still girls. Their frontal lobes are not even fully developed for half of the show. The only sense of true womanhood is teased at the end of the series. Being an insecure, selfish screw-up is a crucial part of maturing, and that’s what Girls captured. The young adults discovering the show for the first time can grow along with the characters. Even though many recent shows highlight the woes of becoming a woman, people still choose Girls because it holds something special. It’s no wonder the folks who were ten when the show came out are seeking it out now because it pushed boundaries in a way that today’s series don’t. Girls has a timeless energy because it doesn’t focus on specific situations, it focuses on specific personalities.
Everyone embarking on a rewatch can look back on the show with newfound wisdom that only comes with growing up. Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, and Shoshanna will remain young and naïve, stuck in an HBO vault forever. Fans of the series, however, can use Girls as a form of introspection. It’s a marker of how far they’ve come and how glad they are to be out of their tumultuous twenties. In all likelihood, they will find that the character they most identify with now is Ray Ploshansky, a jaded cynic who looks down on the younger generation and hates everything nice.
There are essentially two reasons why someone would rewatch a show they’ve already seen before: Either they crave the nostalgia and comfort of it, or they wish to gain something new from it. Girls is one of the few lucky series to provide both in spades. The jokes will make more sense, the characters will seem more real, and the lessons will hit harder every time it’s revisited. That is the beauty of a show designed for its audience to outgrow it. It was misunderstood and shrouded by discourse when it originally aired but deserves recognition now for its cleverly satirical and sublimely accurate depiction of the privileged white girl experience. The truth is, Girls was too ahead of its time to fully resonate until today’s audience got a hold of it.
