The Self-Loathing Joy of Rewatching "Girls"

Over ten years later, I finally get the joke

Sometimes in your life, you experience a moment of perfect synchronicity.  Two seemingly unrelated events line up perfectly, each granting the other more significance than they would have on their own.  This happened to me in the spring of 2012, when I moved to New York City to pursue a career in stand-up comedy, and the first episode of Girls premiered on HBO a month and a half later.  I was 25 years old.  Was there anyone more primed to watch a show about young Millennials trying to make it in Obama-era New York than I was at the time?  I doubt it.

I remember watching the premiere on my laptop in my first New York apartment in Hell's Kitchen.  After that, I never missed an episode, even though my feelings about Girls during its initial run could best be described as “complicated.”  Not only could I not tell if I liked these characters, I couldn’t even tell if I liked the show itself.  Whatever thoughts or feelings it filled me with, it was definitely not “enjoyment” or “laughter,” but it was something.  It was something I couldn’t quite put my finger on, but it kept me coming back each week.

In the summer of 2022, I rewatched all five seasons of Girls with my wife.  2022 was not only the ten year anniversary of the show’s premiere, but also the ten year anniversary of my move to New York.  Was there anyone more primed to rewatch this show, aided by the perspective that comes with time and age?  Probably not.

There was one major difference this time around.  My feelings about Girls became crystal clear to me.  I absolutely loved this show.  All of the things I was unsure about before were now glaringly obvious.  Of course these characters are awful people, every single one of them, and you’re not supposed to like them at all.  There’s Marnie with her aimlessness and eventual joke of a music career, Shoshanna with her bratty girlbossing, Jessa with her grating bohemian wanderlust, Hannah with her everything.  And then there’s the men on the show, all weak and ineffectual in their own unique way.

Since I now realized that I was supposed to dislike these characters, their behavior was no longer confusing or irritating, it was hilarious.  Lena Dunham was making fun of Millennials in 2012 the way Zoomers make fun of us on TikTok today.  It just took ten years for me, and a lot of others, to get the joke.  She truly was the voice of a generation, and that voice had some very critical things to say about its cohort.

Girls was a mirror.  It was about a generation raised on Sex And The City to believe we were the main characters in a glamorous story, and our actions were always justified because they were all a part of our development arc.  In reality, we were just plain obnoxious.  The fact that it was all taking place on HBO, less than a decade after the SATC finale, makes everything that much funnier.  

I was absolutely howling with laughter while rewatching certain scenes.  There’s a moment in season 5 where Hannah is arguing with her well-meaning but hopelessly out-of-his-depth boyfriend Fran.  He chides Hannah for rolling her eyes at him, to which she responds, with all the petulance of a five-year-old, “I was not rolling my eyes at you, I was looking up at a cloud formation that looked a lot like Blake Lively!”  Something about that line, and the way Dunham delivered it, perfectly captured Hannah’s essence.  It was so damn funny.  My wife and I rewound and rewatched it multiple times over.

Then there’s the season 3 episode “Beach House,” often highlighted as one of the best in the series.  This was the breaking point for a lot of the characters, where they realized all at once that they actually don’t like each other very much, and probably shouldn’t hang out anymore.  Breaking up the core cast is a wild move to make in the middle of your show’s run, but Dunham and crew went through with it and never looked back.  Those relationships never really recovered in the following three seasons.  But for my wife and I, the big takeaway from this episode wasn’t what happened, it was what Lena Dunham was wearing.

She spends the entire episode in an ill-fitting green string bikini.  She wears it everywhere.  Not just at the beach, but walking around town as well.  When we rewatched this episode, we were visiting my wife’s childhood home in New Jersey.  My mother-in-law, who was on the couch next to us, could not stop laughing at Dunham’s outfit.  “Why is she wearing that?  She looks terrible!” she kept saying, over and over again.  What was already a funny sight gag was compounded by my mother-in-law’s reaction to it, and it just kept going as the episode wore on.  It’s the hardest I’ve laughed in the last few years.

I could keep going with examples like this, but the specifics are not entirely relevant.  Because what really stuck with me during this rewatch was not the comedic moments, it was what those moments made me realize.  I said at the beginning of this essay that watching Girls when it first aired made me feel “something” that I couldn’t quite articulate.  While I was rewatching the show ten years later, I finally understood what that “something” was.  It was disgust at my own actions and behaviors.  

I was uncomfortable watching Girls during its initial run because I wasn’t ready to confront my personal selfishness and self-centeredness.  All of my worst qualities were laid out before me every Sunday night, and I had a hard time witnessing them.  These characters were arrogant, entitled, and completely unaware of how they came across to people.  At the time, I was convinced that I was going to become an incredibly successful comedian, and I didn’t accept anything that contradicted that worldview.  I’m sure I rubbed plenty of people the wrong way, both in real life and within the comedy world.  I just didn’t see it, at least not consciously.  But I’m a big believer in the idea that nobody really gets away with anything, and I’m sure I knew deep down how annoying I could be.  That’s why I felt so uncomfortable watching the show the first time around, but could never understand why.  It was only ten years later, when life had beaten the arrogance out of me, that I was finally able to see this show for what it was, what it had to say, and how that reflected on me.

However, these qualities did not reflect on me alone.  They were endemic to my entire generation.  That’s what made Girls so impactful and such a lightning rod for controversy.  I’ve said before that Millennial culture is one rooted in performance and exhibitionism.  We grew up during this weird cultural intersection where self-expression was paramount and we had access to all of these tools to express ourselves, endlessly, to anyone who would listen (and even to people who didn’t want to).  It’s what brought Facebook to prominence, and led to all of the other social media platforms that followed it.  We were the first to sign up when we went to college.  We were Patient Zero.  We couldn’t stop showing off, even when what we were sharing in no way matched reality.  

Why do you think Lena Dunham is so frequently naked in Girls?  For me, it’s a commentary on Millennial exhibitionism, baring all of your biggest flaws in what you think is an act of bravery, but is simply unappealing and gross.  We can’t stop taking our lives and turning them into a story to tell others, even if no one cares what we have to say.  I’m clearly guilty of this, still.  I mean, look at this Substack, and look at how many subscribers it actually has.  I can’t stop writing and expressing and talking about what’s gone on in my life, even though I should clearly know better.  At least I have the good sense (and a healthy enough dose of shame) to keep my full name off this thing.

But there are some Millennials, like Dunham, who have taken this desire to overshare and not only made great careers for themselves, but made great art too.  Taylor Swift, the Ultimate Millennial, also suffers from this affliction.  Her whole career has been based on taking her life story (her romantic, interior, and everyday lives), turning it into art, and commodifying it.  Luckily, she’s a generational songwriter with a keen eye for what connects with people, so everything lands smoothly.  Even her most Millennial Cringe aspects have an endearing quality to them, and she’s managed to integrate those into her aesthetic as well.  She really is the Platonic Ideal of what Millennials have always strived to be.  It’s no coincidence that she and Lena Dunham are good friends.

Bo Burnham might be the most singularly talented and interesting artist alive today.  His entire project, from stand-up specials to auteur cinema to whatever you would call the unparalleled brilliance that was Inside, has been about the dangers of performance and constantly interacting with your own image.  Like Dunham, he’s seen what the combination of social media and a desire to perform can do to someone’s psyche, and he’s forever trying to warn us about it.  The Reaction Video sketch from Inside is one of the most insightful things I’ve ever seen.  This is a man who knows we should not have this technology so readily available to us. It’s a bad idea to bear witness to yourself this frequently.

All in all, I’ve very happy that I rewatched Girls two summers ago.  Not only did it change my opinion of the show for the better, but it also cleared up the feelings I struggled with when I initially watched it.  It helped create a clear delineation between “Then” and “Now.”  There was a time in the past where I was young and single and idiotic, and now I’m older and married and only occasionally kind of dumb.  This really became apparent to me while watching the season 3 episode “She Said Yes”, where Hannah has her birthday party at Bar Matchless in Greenpoint.  Back when Girls was first airing, Michael Che and Nimesh Patel hosted a comedy show there every Monday night, and I would go all the time.  It was mostly a networking/show face kind of thing for me, but I was lucky enough to go up on stage a couple of times when someone no-showed for their spot.  Matchless closed awhile back, well before COVID, and I had completely forgotten about this episode.  When it came on, it took me right back to that time in my life.  Even though I was still doing stand-up when I rewatched it, that past felt like an entirely different world to me.

I remembered all those Monday nights, standing in the back of the room, watching an innumerable amount of stand-up sets.  Some were great, some were okay, and some were downright awful.  I remembered nervously walking around, talking to other comics, knowing I was supposed to be doing something productive with my time there, but never quite being sure of what.  I remembered taking the G train back to Queens at the end of the night, wondering when things were finally going to break open for me.  To be frank, most of those memories are not pleasant ones.  And as I was sitting on my couch with my wife, watching Hannah and her friends bop around this bar I had spent so much time in, all I could think to myself was, “Thank God I’m not that guy anymore.”  I missed the lesson Girls had to teach me the first time I saw it.  Luckily, I was able to pick up something equally important on the second go round.