Girls Is Back: Why Now Is the Right Moment for More Millennial Films Like Lena Dunham's Sex and the City

The HBO comedy that defined an era has been set for a new five-episode series. Its darkness and warmth cannot be welcomed more. This is a pop culture emergency. The millennial earthquake that greatly shook my social diet. Girls, the HBO series that captivated audiences in the early Instagram era and turned Lena Dunham into a generational star, is returning for a five-episode series. The project was introduced through a fabricated video call

I am a pop culture emergency. Millennium earthquake that rocked my social feed to a great extent. Girls , the HBO series that stole the show in the early days of Instagram and turned Lena Dunham into a generational star, is returning for a five-episode series. The project was announced via a mock video call with some of the main cast: Alison Williams, Jemima Kirk, Zosia Mamet and Andrew Runnels. They all return for the reboot, which picks up 10 years after the 2017 finale.

Girls captured such a special time when it premiered in 2012. Social media still felt new and exciting, Barack Obama was president, and the so-called "Woke 1" felt like it was going to be the new normal. When you're looking for an identity, the show's characters went through that dreaded 20-something period where everyone seems to have it figured out but you. Dunham's realistic approach to the sex scenes — sticky, awkward, rambling — made the show one of the first shows to be "talked about" on social media, generating endless brainstorming and Twitter threads. He became known as the voice of his generation, but he also became a controversial figure who did not always seem suited to the era's intense and defining reputation.

For Dunham, the "Girls" revival comes as she's taking a victory lap. After a string of successful TV projects and the release of Famesick — her New York Times best-selling memoir, which killed time filming Girls while living with chronic pain — on the rise again, but with reboots usually having varying success rates, the big question is: Can Lena's lightning strike twice?

As a millennial of color who came of age on a cultural diet of Glee, weird #hashtags, and BuzzFeed quizzes, Girls really was my generation's answer to Sex and the City. The shows similarly feature four white women living in New York, and the characters are presented with such specificity and consistency that fans can endlessly debate whether they're "Hannah" or "Carrie." (I'm Miranda on SATC and Marnie on Girls.)

News of Girls' return draws inevitable comparisons to And Just Like That, the post-Covid reboot that brought us back to the world of Carrie Bradshaw at 50. Over the course of three toe-twisting seasons, AJLT launched into a case study of how not to reboot. The show lost much of its original shrewd and biting cynicism, and often seemed more concerned with making up for its past, such as a glaring lack of diversity and a handful of offensive "early 2000s" storylines that underperformed. Some of the characters—notably Miranda Hobbes, whose bemused realism was a vital surface to Carey's delusional romanticism—changed beyond recognition.

Personally, I'm not against Che Diaz in Girls 2.0, but there are a few factors that make it easier for Dunham to take her revival in a very different direction. Since Girls wrapped, it seems like she's been in constant conversation with her characters.In 2023, when I interviewed Allison Williams, the real Marnie Michaels told me she and Dunham had a phone conversation during Covid, where they talked about how to handle the pandemic. "Marnie wrapped herself 100 percent in cellophane, Hannah pretended to do the same, but she was living a secret life," he said. "One of the strengths of those characters is that they're so easy to imagine."

Then there is the timing. While "Girls" is expected to grow into grown women, 10 years is less of a gap than the wave of 2000s reboots we've seen, often tasked with filling the two-decade gap. The 2010s were certainly a different time — pre-Trump and pre-pandemic — but Hannah Horvath had an iPhone and was tweeting for attention. Her world wasn't completely unrecognizable, which made it easier for Dunham to stay true to the parts of the character that fans loved.

Timing may also beg deeper questions at the heart of revival. Girls became popular due to their remarkable combination of warmth and darkness. The show was aspirational in some ways, due to the nature of following four glamorous, privileged women in the big city, but also sharing a vision of them living in small apartments with friends whose big dreams clashed with the reality of the post-recession economy. And if this were a story about any other generation, one would expect characters who have graduated beyond the economic instability and self-doubt of their 20s. But for millennials, it's not that simple. It is better to note how much has not changed for the generation who are the first to be worse off than their parents. Many millennials are still struggling with housing and job insecurity and have the creeping feeling that they are not getting ahead in life. This frustration can be very fruitful for Dunham, who has a particular talent for regionalizing the anxieties of the wider generations taking place.

At the heart of Girls, of course, is its polarizing creator. Unlike SATC, which was often criticized as too white and privileged after the original series ended, Girls was heavily criticized at the time for its lack of diversity. Ten years later, without the noise of unforgiving social media discourse and musings, the genius of the show's humor — and how it skewers the ridiculousness of its characters — is easier to see. Dunham was far from perfect, but now it seems she was mocked in a way that was blatantly disproportionate, often more about her body and sexuality than the show, or even her own willingness to put her foot in it (apologies later). Now, after the success of her memoir, Famesick, we're in a Dunham-aissance period, which is why she's choosing this moment to return to her most popular work.

Ten years on, it's unlikely that the key challenge will be to revive Confession, a theme that seems more mainstream today thanks to a wave of female-fronted shows like Fleabag, Catastrophe and I May Destroy You. Instead, Dunham is tasked with fulfilling the expectations of die-hard fans who have very strong opinions about the characters and have spent years developing their own theories about what they're doing now. Reboots often struggle because they fail to capture what fans loved about the original. But if there's one person who's smart enough to understand what the audience wants from her, Dunham might be that girl.