HBO Orders Girls Revival: Five Episodes, Original Cast Returns — SkimNews
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- HBO has ordered a five-episode Girls revival with creator Lena Dunham and the four leads — Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke, Zosia Mamet and Andrew Rannells — all returning, picking up the story 10 years after the 2017 finale.
- Lena Dunham is at the center of what the author calls a "Dunham-aissance," fueled by her NYT best-selling memoir Famesick and a string of successful TV projects since Girls wrapped.
- The piece draws a pointed contrast with And Just Like That, which the author calls "a case study in how not to do a reboot" for softening characters like Miranda Hobbes "beyond recognition" and losing the original's biting cynicism.
- Allison Williams told the author in a 2023 interview that she and Dunham discussed during Covid how the characters would handle the pandemic — Williams said Marnie "would have 100% wrapped herself in cellophane" while Hannah pretended to do the same but lived "very riskily in secret."
- The article argues millennials — "the first to be worse off than their parents" — remain stuck in the housing and job insecurity the original Girls captured, giving the revival potentially fertile thematic ground.
- Girls faced intense criticism at the time for its lack of diversity, but the author argues ten years on — without "the noise of unforgiving social media discourse" — the show's skewering of its characters is more visible, and Dunham was derided in a way "plainly disproportionate" to the show's actual shortcomings.
Why it matters: Dunham's revival opportunity arrives as she enjoys a 'Dunham-aissance' after her NYT best-selling memoir Famesick, with HBO banking on all four returning for the five-episode order. The author frames And Just Like That as the explicit cautionary tale: a reboot that lost the original's cynicism by softening characters like Miranda beyond recognition, leaving Dunham's challenge less about subject matter than about preserving the sharpness fans loved.
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