It’s been nearly a decade since Girls wrapped its six-season run on HBO, and creator-star Lena Dunham is reflecting on the show’s development and legacy.
In a sprawling conversation with the New York Times‘ David Marchese, the Too Much creator discussed her forthcoming memoir Famesick, in which she reckons with chronic illness, sexual violence and her tumultuous relationship with celebrity. During the interview, she also touched on how Girls has been interpreted by audiences and reflected her life at the time.
While answering a question about how negative public perceptions may have led to perpetuating cycles of self-destruction, Dunham brought up how those narratives echoed themselves on television.
“What was also interesting was those dynamics, which were in life scary at times, lonely — those would be recreated on television and people thought they were funny and fun and at times sexy! I didn’t write Adam [Driver’s] character to be a romantic hero, and by the end, everyone was like, ‘I want a boyfriend like that. I want a boyfriend who throws two-by-fours and spanks me,’ and that is not what I was going for, but it was certainly a lesson in: What we desire cannot be untangled from what we have been through and what we fear,” she said.
In the dramedy — about the trials and tribulations of a squad of 20-something privileged, often self-involved friends in New York City — Driver portrayed main character Hannah Horvath’s (Dunham) on-again, off-again first love.
“That was all of our first job,” Dunham continued elsewhere in the interview about the process of creating the show and what it was like to work with Driver, who broke out in the role. “So I wouldn’t presume to know how anyone — I wouldn’t say that Girls would be a roadmap for how anyone behaved anywhere else. It was very, like, ‘Seven strangers sent to live in a house in Seattle. What’s gonna happen?’”
She added, “One thing that’s miraculous is, no one dated and no one punched each other. In a way, we did the best you possibly could, and always, and I hope I portray this in the book, Adam is a meticulous artist and where he has to go to get there is secondary, to me, to where he gets. I love watching him; I learned more from him than anyone I’ve ever stood across from on camera.”
While Girls often pulled in less than a million viewers each episode, it nonetheless was the talk of the town upon its premiere in 2012, becoming the subject of much critique and praise as it cemented itself as a seminal series. The slice of life show was nominated for a total of 19 Emmys, winning two.
