Let’s start with the name. Right away, Lena Dunham gave her audience too much credit: Girls, her HBO auteur vehicle the pilot of which aired 10 years ago on April 15, was always meant as a loving jab at the show’s protagonists, a blissfully clueless New York City foursome much further from womanhood than they assumed of themselves.
But that’s not really how culture has worked for the past decade. The joke sailed right over the heads of Dunham’s many critics, who accused her of the narcissistic belief that her cossetted East Village upbringing was somehow a stand-in for the universal experience of womanhood. Girls premiered at a strange time in American life — nearly halfway through the Obama era, just as the sunny liberal optimism of its early years was beginning to curdle into resentment and cultural sectarianism. Dunham found herself caught between worlds as a writer and public figure, a dyed-in-the-wool feminist and liberal too stubborn and too self-critical to ever pander to her audience. A decade later, it’s clear that as her reputation suffered, the world’s savvy TV viewers benefited just as much.
The show’s premise was hardly novel. In fact, it was almost directly borrowed from its progenitor series Sex and the City, a simple dramedy about four white women trying to Live, Laugh, and Love in the Big Apple. But where Sex and the City was an unmistakable product of Giuliani’s Manhattan, Girls was of James Murphy’s Brooklyn: twenty-something hipsters, spandex, cocaine, student loans. Its zeitgeistiness was authentically novel for television in that era, and as such earned the revulsion of many of those it more or less depicted, like Oscar Wilde’s 19th-century, Caliban-esque bourgeoisie. In her life and her art during this period, Dunham most frequently put her foot in it when it came to the eternally hot-button subjects in American life around which the rest of her generation was busy creating newer, ever more Byzantine taboos: race and sex.
With regard to the former, one of the earliest and most consistent critiques of Girls was that it was “too white”; like NBC’s Friends, it seemed to depict a New York City almost entirely populated by white people. Dunham responded to this with a second-season episode of the show that prominently featured Donald Glover, the then-rising-star black comedian and musician, as her love interest — and an idiosyncratic, irascible political conservative, who actively critiques Dunham’s character for her expectations about his personal ideology. It was far ahead of its time as a rebuke of the white liberal narcissism that assumes ideological homogeneity along racial or identity lines. Predictably, it earned Dunham and co-writer and -creator Jenni Konner less than zero credit. (“Why ‘Girls’ Won’t Ever Overcome Its Racial Problem,” clucked the headline on an Atlantic article from the time that dings Dunham and others “not because they excluded characters of color, but because they placed them at the center of their works and represented their experience in ways some found problematic.” Never mind the screaming that would have obviously ensued had Dunham made a naive attempt to plumb the depths of the black millennial soul, something a fellow creator would soon do very well for HBO anyway in Insecure.)
Outspoken feminist that Dunham is, sex was more naturally in the show’s wheelhouse. A very early episode features the gang’s resident free spirit, portrayed by Jemima Kirke, scheduling an abortion after a hookup. She doesn’t show, choosing instead to have anonymous bathroom sex at a bar in the middle of the afternoon (with a man portrayed, unaccountably, by the great character actor Neal Huff in a brief and nearly wordless performance). Soon after, she gets her period and experiences a moment of ambivalent catharsis at the end of a pregnancy she clearly wasn’t quite decisive about giving up. Meanwhile, Dunham’s stand-in chitters away obliviously to her OB-GYN, opining about how maybe she wishes she had AIDS, partially as “a really good excuse to be mad at a guy.”
The scene is very funny, and the episode’s overall theme of biological precarity is pitched perfectly between said humor and the fearless display of emotion from her not-pregnant counterpart. It’s a subject the show would consistently nail, including in a late-series arc in which the character played by Adam Driver (now of Star Wars fame) discovers his girlfriend has terminated her pregnancy without consulting him, not exactly a subject many feminist writers tackle with enthusiasm. This sensitivity and self-awareness, of course, made it all the more funny, depending on how you look at it, when a few years later, Dunham inspired what was by then her umpteenth tempest-in-a-teapot controversy by joking on a podcast that although she hadn’t had an abortion, she wished she had. It’s a blessing and a curse for an artist: not only the inability to censor thoughts nearly everyone else in the world would, but to feel compelled to shout them from the largest platform imaginable.
So, it was no surprise, either, that her pithy 2014 memoir, Not That Kind of Girl, earned similar recriminations when her frank description of childhood sexual exploration earned accusations of literal child molestation from a puritanical mob, or when her jokes about failing to earn a once-over from world-famous football player Odell Beckham Jr. spurred a bizarre discourse about racism. Both in her life and art, Dunham has consistently run toward the danger, as they say; it’s simply much easier to trip and fall in the former than it is in the latter.
Oddly, or maybe naturally enough, the episode of Girls that tackles 21st-century feminist agita head-on is arguably not only its most successful, but its most acclaimed. “American Bitch” aired in February 2017, less than a year before the #MeToo movement exploded. In it, Dunham’s character goes to the apartment of a wealthy and successful male novelist played by a saturnine Matthew Rhys, to interview him about accusations of sexual assault leveled at him on Tumblr. The episode is structured as a duel of sorts between Dunham and Rhys, as the former tries to discern the truth while the latter tries to figure out what he might get out of such an interaction. If you haven’t seen it, I won’t spoil the outcome for you. In an era in which the moralistic storytelling of the Hays Code era has come back with a vengeance, the episode’s unflinching ambiguity about its conclusions was undeniable enough to earn plaudits from even the critics who would have otherwise been prepared to pounce.
In retrospect, it’s both very easy to see why Dunham so consistently earned the hammer blows of Twitterized controversy and very difficult to understand how in the public imagination this could have so frequently overshadowed the consistent acclaim for her program. Of course, even more so than most mediums, television is a collaborative practice, but few shows bear their auteur figure’s personality more than Girls, which certainly explains things somewhat. Professionally, Dunham is no pariah, having recently been announced as the writer and director of a film based on the 1980s-era Polly Pocket toy (your guess is as good as mine on that one, but I’m sure it’ll make a lot of money). But the show still retains its capacity to polarize violently those who experienced it and the cultural moment it captured. To argue about Dunham, about Girls, is to argue about ourselves and to leave no ambiguity as to our place on the moral and ideological spectrum that flattened so much of the past decade.
The refusal to do so, of course, is what earned Dunham her pariahdom. Prime millennials, the Girls generation that staked out the boundaries of our past decade’s political and cultural discourse, are getting old; we’re buying houses and we’re having children, like Dunham’s character herself at the series’ end. We’re exiting the psychic hothouse of personal and political entanglement for something looser, greyer, and more adult. Maybe even the most reluctant among us can admit now that Girls was just a great TV show, one of the greatest of its era. Far more interesting will be to see how the next generation parses it, one that seemingly bears all the ideological commitments of its predecessors and then some, but also a hefty dose of skepticism toward performative moralizing and norm-policing. I can think of a certain problematic fave who would approve.
Derek Robertson is a contributing editor to Politico Magazine. Find him at Afternoondelete.com.
