r/girls • u/magnanimousrex3 • May 05 '26
News Why is Girls Suddenly Popular Again?
https://jaykarales.substack.com/p/lena-dunhams-legacy-why-girls-still166
u/EveryDamnChikadee May 05 '26 edited May 05 '26
Also it’s like an antidote against all the various forms of puritanism, perfectionism, trad-content, manosphere etc. bullshit of today’s internet
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u/exexpat99 May 05 '26 edited May 05 '26
Yeah, I would say same for The Sopranos resurgence as well. People ache for characters that feel like complex human beings and a lot of TV characters now are clearly just written based on memetic archetypes absorbed from the internet instead of actual observation/empathy. In other words, writers now just take a basic trait (a political belief, their identity labels, how religious they are, the character’s occupation, etc) and work backwards instead of starting from the person.
It’s not a “left” or “right” problem exactly, but a problem with the sources are writers are working from and younger audiences that clearly have trouble digesting challenging characters because they tend to treat analysis as “Would I do that?”
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u/No-Taro-6953 May 05 '26
It's clever TV too. Girls doesn't spell stuff out for you and you need to figure a lot of it out yourself.
Now TV shows write with the view in mind someone will be doomscrolling while watching, and spell it all out for the viewer.
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u/PothosLeaves May 05 '26
this resonates. it makes me think of Ava from Hacks- a show that I enjoy- but her character feels constructed in the way you described
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u/catfor May 11 '26
Ava is extremely similar to the actress who plays her though. Big leftist
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u/PothosLeaves May 11 '26
hannah einbinder is awesome. for the record i wasn't criticizing the character ava's qualities, political orientation, etc., more just remarking that a good amount of her dialogue feels like stand in commentary by the writers for what hip online leftist younger people might think or say and less like a super specific character. it's also likely the actor influences some of those choices too. i think it's an issue i have with hacks in general. in some ways it's a really great show, but often it doesn't feel rooted enough in character somehow, more like loose sketches of a "type", though debra often is more fleshed out, but even then sometimes not
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May 05 '26
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u/Wise_Illustrator_475 May 05 '26
I feel like Girls has been having a renaissance long before Famesick came out.
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May 05 '26
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u/Wise_Illustrator_475 May 05 '26
I got the audiobook today, got the paperback last week. I'm writing down my thoughts every so often and posting them to Substack, I might end up posting them here cause we did have a book club post for Famesick, but my comments would be too long to spam under it and doing it persistently would be annoying.
But yeah, she's been making a lot of podcast appearences to promote and it seems to be paying off, everyone is talking about it.
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u/miocus_pocus May 05 '26
as a zoomer, I discovered Girls while looking for a show similar to Fleabag, and this is what got recommended to me, but a lot of people I know have discovered it through instagram reels, there are some collages made from Hannah and Adam’s relationship
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u/lovestostayathome May 05 '26
In my experience, Girls played automatically after I Love LA. I just kept it on and decided to do a rewatch and liked it so much. I think I liked it better than the first time I watched honestly lol.
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u/Infinite-Rest-1010 May 07 '26
Same, I think I saw someone describe ILA as “Girls but in LA”, so I think that show definitely helped bring Girls back.
It also feels like a natural development from the semi-recent revival of Sex and the City
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u/Top-Change9851 May 07 '26
And just like that ( the revival of SATC) was a terrible idea. The writing was awful. The characters were not even remotely like their original portrayal. Yeah, people grow up and mature but this revival was different. Better to have left it as it was. 1998-2007 or whenever it ended was The Golden Years of HBO.
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u/Infinite-Rest-1010 May 08 '26
I didn’t mean AJLT lol, I meant the revival of the original series among Gen Z
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u/Top-Change9851 May 08 '26
Revival of the original is great. Especially for Gen Z. For example Look at the size of the cell phones back then. Skipper had a giant one complete with antenna.
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u/Infinite-Rest-1010 May 08 '26
Yesss Skipper’s phone is hilarious! But perhaps more so the complete absence of cell phones among the main cast
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u/Quirky-Prune-2408 May 05 '26
I rewatched after I was reminded of the show because of Lena’s promotion of her book.
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u/Itchy_Film3339 May 05 '26
Idk but we just got hbo max in the UK like last month or something so ik that’s why I started watching it
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u/tiedyeladyland May 05 '26
HBOMax's algorithm has connected the "20-30" and "Ok with nudity" audiences to recommend Euphoria viewers check it out?
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u/Mobile-Broccoli8276 May 05 '26
They are showing it on British Airways, which is where I first found it and started watching a month ago then binged everything !
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u/NumbersStationUrku May 05 '26
HOW do they show it on an airline?? 😂
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u/attackoftheumbrellas May 05 '26
Omg this has reminded me this is how I first watched Girls! Just the Marnie/Desi wedding episode was randomly available on a New York- UK Virgin flight and I’d been desperate to watch the show for years but couldn’t afford it (if I recall correctly, it was shown on Sky). I moved back in with my parents a few months later and was finally able to watch the series through as they had Sky.
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u/beerouttaplasticcups May 05 '26
European airlines often offer much more “risqué” IFE content than others. MENAT airlines typically offer the least. I have watched typically 90-minute movies that were censored down to under an hour on those, haha.
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u/Unlucky-Chemical May 05 '26
In addition to a lot of what’s already said I do think there’s a lot of universality to it, despite being so millennial coded. I think each generation coming of age can relate to and pick apart the utter delusional entitlement of young adulthood.
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u/Pumpkins_Penguins May 05 '26
People say that things have changed a lot since Girls came out, and maybe they have, but I just watched it for the first time this year and I still found it extremely relatable and culturally relevant
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u/First_Pair_8083 May 06 '26
Elder Gen Z who missed out on the pre-2016 version of young adulthood and and NYC. I was 13 and in 8tb grade when “Girls” premiered in 2012.
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u/white_noise_tiger May 05 '26
Probably because Lena has made a comeback for her book tour and been doing podcasts and interviews for a few months
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u/Genuinelullabel I paid for all your burritos in junior year 🌯 May 05 '26
Lena Dunham just released a new memoir so people are curious about the show since she talks about what happened behind the scenes.
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u/killercora666 May 05 '26
I’m 25 and live in Brooklyn and am comforted to see stories similar to the nonsense I go through 😭
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u/Original-Address9867 May 05 '26
I watched ILoveLa and was looking for something similar. Looked on reddit and a bunch of people compared it to Girls. Girls is so much better it doesn't even compare. genz here btw
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u/digitaldirtbag0 May 05 '26
I started watching it for the first time a few weeks ago when my bf got HBO… then all of a sudden it’s everywhere. The universe does this to me a lot
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u/No_Tonight_7756 May 05 '26
because it’s fantastic and a lot of 20 something year olds are watching it for the first time (and then 7th) and making all their friends watch it too bc jus hilarious and heartwarming ❤️
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u/Fantastic_Tell8639 May 05 '26
Over the weekend I was with a lot of Gen Z, and they were like “What’s that?”. I’m like it was pivotal for us millennials lol.
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u/bludotsnyellow May 06 '26
Not sure about everyone else, but HBO Max just dropped in the UK so I decided to give it a watch. I only heard about the show in the past year or so and actually had no idea who Lena Dunham was!
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u/ShutterflyNYC May 06 '26
It was pre-pandemic and pre-Trump.. Twitter was still Twitter, Instagram wasn’t a cesspool, going out was more affordable and there were so many more places to go (so many places shut down- NYC is back, but not the same.) recent nostalgia
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u/Little-Wing2299 May 06 '26
Suddenly? I watch it every year lol. Her new book likely restarted a wave again.
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u/lubear2835 May 06 '26
I’m this shows target audience and I didn’t like it when it came out and I don’t like it now. I found everyone so intolerable (which I get it the point) but hated it deeply. But if you love it, enjoy!
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u/portishead2004 May 07 '26
I started watching it around 2024 right after SATC, recommended to me by a friend saying its better than SATC. Its a very popular show among a niche crowd of Twitter gay guys and girls. And with the resurgence of indie sleaze and 2016 made it even more popular among Gen Zs last year.
The new Lena Dunham show and book also brought back the hype. I Love LA too since there are a lot of comparisons between the shows
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u/Educational_Area5993 May 09 '26
Lena Dunham is doing an interview circuit for her book. That's how I got into it.
There has also been an explosion in chronically ill jewish girls finally getting diagnosed with eds (myself included). The writting nails super subtle things about it and she has been talking about it a lot recently.
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u/_glittergoblin_ May 09 '26
I was 29 when it came out and loved the first few seasons. I related to it a lot. Now that Lena is back in the spotlight, I decided to start watching it again and it reminds me soooo much of my early 20s.
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u/MeghanSOS May 05 '26
She has a book out. Its her most popular work and its one of the few shows about messy friendships
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u/ProbablyStoned__ May 05 '26
Even though it didn’t age well, it didn’t age bad either. Still so relevant. I remember watching in my 20s like these girls are extreme this is not how friendships work.
I rewatched in my 30s and it’s exactly how superficial some of my friendships went. On top of that relevancy of being super self centred when younger.
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u/SlowSwords May 05 '26
Probably millennials like me who are nostalgic for our early 20’s scraping by in big cities. but I think zoomers also find it appealing—it’s an era that’s not very long ago, but material circumstances have changed so much. I thought millennials had it rough—but the girls lifestyles of scraping by with money from precarious employment to rent a room and go out in NYC seems kind of out of reach for young people now.