Thank Gen Z for reviving "Girls".

During its initial run, the HBO series served as the foundation for everything wrong with millennial white women. Then Gen Z started watching.

Using its native tongue: the Internet, Gen Z promoted the show through memes, clips and podcasts, and now, as if en masse, it's getting a five-episode reboot, HBO announced Wednesday.

When Girls first aired in 2012, it was a disaster. The rave reviews were usurped by a relentless onslaught of sexism and misogyny commenting on Dunham's body, the type of sexuality portrayed on screen, and Baby Nepo's accusations against the show's stars, as well as the show's lack of diversity. There were endless reactions and reactions to reactions. The show became everyone's favorite for fair criticism and deliberate misunderstanding, and creator Dunham was the one caught in the crosshairs of so much outrage as she began to defend everything wrong with millennial white women.

But then something happened. A decade after it aired, everyone started rewatching Girls. It's not just that people were talking about it online. The New York Times reported that between November 2022 and January 2023, the show's viewership doubled compared to the previous three months. On Tiktok and Instagram, memes and supercuts began to circulate: Marnie prepared with a microphone in the infamous green dress. Hannah says, "I'm busy, trying to be who I am," or Shoshanna says, "Aw, we're ladies!" It finally clicked for viewers and sparked a cultural and critical revival. While reviews aged like lions, the show aged like wine.

It was a phenomenon largely fueled by Gen Z viewers who missed the show the first time around. (Plus notable millennial girl "truthers" like Hunter Harris, Peyton Dix, and Evan Ross Katz.) Among those Gen Z viewers were Amelia Rittaler and Evan Lazarus, the Brooklyn comedians who launched the Girls Rewatch podcast in 2023.

"I think the rest of society got to [Dunham]," says Rittler, 28. "Everyone was kind of under the impression that they weren't allowed to say publicly that they loved the show and thought it was great. But Evan and I were like, this show is amazing. Why is everyone mad at him?"

Gen Z in particular was able to identify with a style that many millennials failed to understand. "A lot of what we grew up on was emotionally removed, 'the world's on fire, but let's dance through it,'" she says. "I feel like millennials were kind of in their prime when this movie came out. Millennium optimism from all of them. "I feel like Gen Z never got that, so we always watched it through this comic lens that Lena wrote it in."

Rittaler and Lazarus posted girly memes on TikTok and Instagram and amassed a following that allowed them to have guests like Dunham on the show, as well as Allison Williams (Marnie), Andrew Runnels (Elijah) and Zosia Mamet (Shoshana). "I think 70% of you guys did," Jemima Kirk (Jessa) announced on her Instagram account on the day the podcast was revived. "I feel like I loved my favorite show of my life," Lazarus said in a teary-eyed video.

The show's redemption period coincided with Dunham's memoir Famesick, which was released in April, further fueling Girls' Nostalgia. "I feel like I'm getting a girl director reading Famesick," says Deeks, who hosts the Lemme Say This podcast with Hunter Harris.

The book became a New York Times bestseller with a sensational tour. More importantly, there was a public audit of how the culture mistreated Dunham. It felt like a well-tied bow around the girls' physical and psychological trauma. He had moved to London, gotten sober, written extensively about chronic illness, worked on shows like Industry and Too Much. Last month, she announced that she was born via surrogate.

There's never been an outright demand from fans for a reboot, especially after the Sex and the City reboot and rightly so... but the show's surge in popularity no doubt caught the attention of HBO executives, thanks to die-hard General Zerz spreading the good news online. In a Substack post published on Wednesday, Dunham credited fans for helping her return to the show. "Perhaps there was once a part of me that wanted to outdo Hannah and her ladies," she writes. "It helped me to see the love you so generously shared."

"The fans are just queers and sensitive girls who write down their memories," says Deeks. "The people she's nurturing are no longer critics, it feels, or people who want to make weird comments about her body. It's just young people, she wants to help inform or entertain."

Of course, part of the reason for the revival is that everything is back: Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, iCarly, and countless others have also seen reboots and sequels in recent years. "It's nostalgia, for sure," Rittaler says. But it's bad that we don't have any new IP that is higher than that. I walk around Brooklyn every day and think how come we made Girls in 2012 and then things got worse?

But Gen Z is also ready for a millennial optimism they've never experienced. Mid-2010s nostalgia has surfaced online, with people posting photos of themselves in 2016 yearning for fixed-gear bikes, brown-tinted photos, and clapping music.

"I think there's an energy, especially in New York right now, that really embodies millennial optimism, and I think girls are absolutely part of that cultural conversation," Dix says. "It fits nicely into the new world we're building that's kind of based on 'first-term Obama happiness.' It's nice to feel happy again when it's really hard to find."