What if the Girls Reboot isn’t Good?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any great Western city in the 2020s must be in want of a zeitgeisty show following the lives and loves of a group of 20-somethings within it. At least, that’s what studio heads clearly think. Launched during lockdown, Emily in Paris is still bemoaned by Parisians for being wildly kitsch and impossibly maximalist; despite charming zillennials across the globe, Rachel Sennott’s I Love LA left my friends in Los Angeles wanting more.

“We have got to stop enabling New Yorkers,” my friend said.

Londoners have not been excluded from this young-adult sitcom renaissance, nor from the subsequent indignation of the shows’ local subjects. Our excitement crossed the threshold into genuine awe when we heard that Lena Dunham, patron saint of the genre, was redirecting her efforts from the Brooklyn streets of Girls to the Hackney roads of Too Much.

And yet, I genuinely do not know anybody who managed to get past episode three. Look. We love Lena. We tried to like Too Much! But if there had been a volcanic eruption over London, Pompeii-style, God knows we’d probably deserve it — the last remaining street graffiti of our time would be FUCKING SHIT WASTE OF TIME over a billboard of Meg Stalter at Dalston Kingsland.

It came as a genuine surprise to us that we wouldn’t like Too Much; that Too Much was, in fact, not enough. For Lena Dunham, through the immediately iconic, rapidly generation-defining Girls, is perhaps the sole individual behind this boom in the subgenre of shows, which today includes series like Adults, Overcompensating, and Not Suitable for Work.

By now, you will have heard the news about the Girls revival. It didn’t break the internet, but it did shatter my corner of it. The video of Lena Dunham on Zoom (or something like Zoom, whatever!) addressing her co-stars Alison Williams, Zosia Mamet, Jemima Kirke, and Andrew Rannells, asking if they’d be interested in revisiting Girls once again for a five-episode update, was reshared on Instagram by every girl I’ve complained about men with in a club toilet.

Girls isn’t just an incredible TV show; it is that rare piece of art that encapsulates not just a generation, but the bittersweet lived experience of being young in a city. To be a bit lost, a bit stupid, while hopelessly navigating a cruel world with wonderful moments of brazen humor and unexpected kindness is not a new tale, but Dunham’s generational talent has done the near-impossible: it has transcended its moment in millennial time and become a deserving staple of the culture, something only the likes of fellow New York City shows Friends and Sex and the City have achieved.

And like Sex and the City, Girls is coming back to update audiences on what their love-to-hate characters are up to, nearly two decades on.

Like Sex and the City’s And Just Like That, will the Girls reboot disappoint?

I’m so sorry for saying this. Even merely typing it feels like sacrilege. I fucking love Lena Dunham: as with all girl writers of my generation, she is the Instagram portrait to which I pray. If Lena Dunham were British, she’d have received a damehood for her services to the arts. But because she’s American, she gets the USA version, which is an invite to Taylor Swift’s wedding. (At which our girl allegedly pissed off half the audience by saying American football is kind of gay… Lena’s clearly still got it.)

But will Girls? Does somebody who carpools with Andrew Scott and Zadie Smith to this aforementioned celebrity wedding of the year still have her finger on the pulse of what makes the common urbanite tick? Perhaps art — the deeply felt personal, the cringe-inducingly relatable — is more conditional upon the artist’s circumstances than we acknowledge.

For in Girls, Hannah Horvath and her friends are constantly worried about funds and romances, their careers and their health. They are utterly obnoxious in the way only precocious 20-somethings can be. And it’s why we love the show so much. “I have work. I have a dinner thing. And then I am busy, trying to become who I am,” Hannah famously announces to her parents. “You know what the weirdest part about having a job is?” Jemima Kirke’s Jessa Johansson says in a separate episode. “You have to be there, every day, even on the days you don’t feel like it.”

The girls — and guys — of Girls could deliver these sentences with such conviction because Lena Dunham wrote them as somebody who was living within that impossible world of post-grad entitlements and parental handouts, flatmate-hopping and boyfriend-sharing, squat parties and brief opium experimentation.

Next year, Girls will begin production. As Lena Dunham says in the Zoom Or Whatever video, can they still call it Girls — aren’t they now women? For the magic of Girls is contained within its mere, monosyllabic name: adulthood does not equal maturity, and age is not a reliable metric of wisdom. But does great success — deservedly soaring, stratospheric achievement, and the lifestyle that comes with it — naturally hinder the ability to return to a world in which the characters are beloved not for their accolades, but rather for their lack thereof and, importantly, how they relate to it?

When Hannah gets her first essay published in The New York Times — an essay about learning that her ex-boyfriend and her supposed best friend are dating — Marnie, reading the paper on the toilet, throws it down with a big beam on her face. “Hannah’s in print!” she announces to her empty studio apartment.

Success in your dream career, the sunlit, spacious apartment, the perfect partner: like the Girls girls, these remain the tenets of life we covet. But it’s these unspoken moments of love, shared between those navigating the empty, hungry years of early adulthood together, that bind the pages of the real story: it’s why we have so many shows celebrating these seemingly impossible years of our lives. Once one escapes them, can one ever truly return?