The backlash started before this show began. 13 years later, it's found its audience

Sydney Morning Herald

7 days ago

The backlash had begun before Girls even premiered – how had this 25-year-old indie filmmaker with one feature under her belt locked down an HBO deal with Judd Apatow? We didn't yet use the phrase 'nepo baby', but Dunham's NYC-based artist parents sounded glamorous enough to have connections that made it possible. Once the show premiered it was like a shot of nitrous in the hot takes engine that fuelled online media – especially its unvarnished sex scenes, often featuring moments of discomfort and shots of Dunham's very normal body that were not optimised to be titillating or 'flattering'.
The show's reputation also suffered from the conflation of Dunham's character with Dunham herself. Hannah's gracelessness dovetailed neatly with Dunham's sometimes clumsy navigation of becoming a public figure.
I wrote about Girls regularly and when it came up in conversation people (usually women) would say 'I just find them all so insufferable, especially her.' They would wince and squirm, the way I do about the exquisite but (for me) unwatchable cringe comedy of Curb Your Enthusiasm – a fictional show with a protagonist explicitly based on its actual creator that is nonetheless received as fiction.
In the years since the show's sixth and final season ended in 2018, Dunham's reputation as a particular kind of annoying, oblivious white woman had crystallised. A provocatively phrased story in her collection of essays about inappropriate play with her baby sibling Cyrus when she was a small child is behind the oft-repeated claims that she is a sexual abuser, despite Cyrus repeatedly denying any harm. More troubling was her full-throated defence of a Girls writer accused of assault, which Dunham later retracted and apologised for. But while Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner vanished from public life after being accused of sexual harassment (an accusation he has contested), it didn't spark any soul-searching about whether his creation was still one of the greatest TV shows of all time.
Loading
All this is to say that despite the critical praise and 19 Emmy nominations, it still feels like Girls never had a chance to be received on its own merits.
Its current renaissance feels two-pronged: younger audiences watching for the first time as adults, and people in their 30s or older appreciating this wise, spiky coming-of-age story with the benefit of a little hindsight. For all that people say they want relatable content, seeing yourself in awkward, annoying characters is sometimes just too painful if you haven't made peace with your own annoying awkwardness.
One of the major flashpoints of Gen Z's obsession is Marnie Michaels, Hannah's best friend (herself based on Dunham's real-life BFF and #girlboss final boss, The Wing founder Audrey Gelman). Marnie is a put-together striver with perfect hair, a shiny foil for Hannah's bush-out messiness, cursed with far more determination than self-awareness.
If you were playing Which Girls Girl Are You?, nobody wanted to be a Marnie. Actor Allison Williams recently theorised that audiences hated her character so much because it was 'a really unflattering mirror – a lot of people were Marnies and didn't want to admit it.' Much of the cringe was that she tried hard, and openly wanted things, and Williams says Gen Z viewers are reframing Marnie's fussiness as self-care and self-knowledge on the path to the life she wants to lead.
'A lot of people don't want to be seen becoming something,' Williams said. 'They just wanna be it already.'
As the first generation to do a huge amount of our 'becoming' online and thus in public, in ways we're still reckoning with, millennials have been the butt of the joke online for a few years now – both snark-poisoned and too earnest, clinging to nostalgic media as we enter ungraceful middle age. But we're also old enough to look at people in their 20s and younger with real tenderness, and forgive them their cringe because it is also ours.