TMC
03-17-2023, 08:26 PM
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/16/style/girls-show-hbo-lena-dunham.html
Viewership of Lena Dunham’s HBO dramedy is surging as many millennials reassess their 20s and a show that defined them.
Jill Badlotto was in her 20s when she developed a “love-hate” relationship with the HBO dramedy “Girls.” While the show aired, Ms. Badlotto watched the main characters — Hannah, Marnie, Jessa and Shoshanna — hop from unpaid gigs to Brooklyn raves, all the while criticizing one another for the narcissism they failed to recognize in themselves.
When Ms. Badlotto, now 35 and a wedding coordinator in South Florida, rewatched the show this year, the characters still grated on her. But this time she didn’t recoil so strongly.
“I see so much more of myself in them,” she said, then paused. “Maybe that’s why I hated them so much.”
A little over a decade after the show's debut, people are rewatching — and sometimes reconsidering — “Girls,” Lena Dunham’s series about four white women lurching through their 20s in New York City. The series’ viewership doubled between November and January compared with the previous three months, according to a spokesperson for HBO.
Returning and first-time viewers are dissecting the show in bars and group chats, uploading supercuts to TikTok and using “Girls” to reflect on the very recent past. (In Season 1, Marnie uses a Blackberry and Jessa has a flip phone.)
“I like to call it a period piece,” said Julia Gray, 27, a journalist in Brooklyn and the host of “Girls Room,” a “Girls” rewatch podcast she created last year.
“Girls” was released in 2012 amid a flurry of hot takes that argued millennials were the whiniest, laziest generation yet. The show knowingly played into and poked fun at those clichés beginning with its first episode, in which Ms. Dunham’s character, Hannah, is cut off by her parents and then declares that she may be the voice — “or at least a voice” — of her generation.
Viewership of Lena Dunham’s HBO dramedy is surging as many millennials reassess their 20s and a show that defined them.
Jill Badlotto was in her 20s when she developed a “love-hate” relationship with the HBO dramedy “Girls.” While the show aired, Ms. Badlotto watched the main characters — Hannah, Marnie, Jessa and Shoshanna — hop from unpaid gigs to Brooklyn raves, all the while criticizing one another for the narcissism they failed to recognize in themselves.
When Ms. Badlotto, now 35 and a wedding coordinator in South Florida, rewatched the show this year, the characters still grated on her. But this time she didn’t recoil so strongly.
“I see so much more of myself in them,” she said, then paused. “Maybe that’s why I hated them so much.”
A little over a decade after the show's debut, people are rewatching — and sometimes reconsidering — “Girls,” Lena Dunham’s series about four white women lurching through their 20s in New York City. The series’ viewership doubled between November and January compared with the previous three months, according to a spokesperson for HBO.
Returning and first-time viewers are dissecting the show in bars and group chats, uploading supercuts to TikTok and using “Girls” to reflect on the very recent past. (In Season 1, Marnie uses a Blackberry and Jessa has a flip phone.)
“I like to call it a period piece,” said Julia Gray, 27, a journalist in Brooklyn and the host of “Girls Room,” a “Girls” rewatch podcast she created last year.
“Girls” was released in 2012 amid a flurry of hot takes that argued millennials were the whiniest, laziest generation yet. The show knowingly played into and poked fun at those clichés beginning with its first episode, in which Ms. Dunham’s character, Hannah, is cut off by her parents and then declares that she may be the voice — “or at least a voice” — of her generation.