Last semester, during an unforgiving Ithaca winter, I embarked on a journey that changed my life; I started watching Girls, Lena Dunham’s vanity project on HBO. Girls was a show that dared to ask the question, what if every character in Sex and the City was more annoying and twee? It aired from 2012 to 2017 and followed four girl friends who try to grapple with the horrors of being 20-somethings in New York City. Some aspects are definitely dated, as Lena Dunham is known for her controversies, but it still holds a level of relatability today.
Although the show is over a decade old, it has had a recent rise in popularity on TikTok. This popularity was elevated further when two Gen Z comedians, Amelia Ritthaler and Evan Lazarus, started the HBO Girls Rewatch Podcast, where they recapped each episode of the show. When they had guests, they’d ask, “Girl, what Girl are you?”, prompting their guest to take a deep look inwards at what character from the show best illustrates their best and worst traits. My friends and I play our own rendition of “Girl, what Girl are you?” with pretty much every television show we watch. It’s like our very own Buzzfeed quiz, except far more personalized. We’ve covered Derry Girls, Sex and the City, The L Word – any piece of media that portrays the complexities of female friendships. But when it comes time to identify each other as characters from Girls, there always seems to be some interpersonal tension, just like in the show.
It’s not that one character is better than the others; most of the characters are equally self-involved. Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham), the appointed lead, is a narcissistic personal essayist who embraces her destructive tendencies for the sake of writing a perfect memoir. She is also hooking up with an aggressive theater actor, Adam (Adam Driver), for most of the show’s run and typically ignores her friends to hang out with him instead. Hannah has ultimate main character syndrome, but I think it’d be difficult to find a personal essayist who doesn’t. I say this, of course, as a personal essayist who relates to Hannah the most out of the main four. Hannah acts as the show’s main protagonist, so as we watch the world through her lens, it is easy to empathize with her foolish decisions and immoral actions.
Marnie Michaels (Allison Williams) is Hannah’s uptight best friend and roommate who hates when things don’t go her way. After breaking up with her long-term boyfriend Charlie (Christopher Abbott) for being too in love with her, Marnie goes through an identity crisis, tanking her relationships as she tries on different personalities. Once, while I was watching Girls with my friend Sara DiLorenzo, a junior at IC, they told me that they found Marnie to be the most empathetic of the Girls. “She tries too hard to be perfect,” Sara shared when I asked about their fondness for Marnie. “She tries to keep her friendships together so hard but she ends up smothering them and pushing them away. And that’s why I love her so much.” Although Marnie comes across as overbearing to those around her, her passion makes her an empathetic character. She acts as the glue of the friend group, leading the audience to root for her.
Jessa Johansson (Jemima Kirke) is free-spirited and self-assured. She enters the show as the aloof friend from college who dropped out, went to rehab, and then traveled the world. Jessa can be noncommittal, even to her friendships with the other characters in the show. She is also magnetic, with characters flocking to her side to try and absorb some of her charm. My friend Madeline Murphy, who currently attends fashion school in London, seemed like the perfect person to interview about what it means to be a Jessa. “Jessa’s word is final, and she’s not afraid of being disliked,” Madeline told me over WhatsApp. “She inhabits every corner of herself, sometimes to her own detriment. This same quality also leads me to dislike her sometimes, since she demands the universe to revolve around her (which occasionally the universe obeys).” Life comes easy to Jessa, which makes the viewer and other characters distrust her while also constantly wanting more of her eccentric escapades.
Shoshanna Shapiro (Zosia Mamet), Jessa’s younger cousin, is naive and chronically nervous. Shosh is still in college at the start of the show, so she goes through the most development throughout the seasons. She is the best listener and friend within the group, but often lets the other three walk all over her. It is easy to love Shosh, but oftentimes she can seem pitiful. She is left on the outskirts of plotlines and in the backs of scenes. She is usually the only reasonable character, but allows herself to be talked over and forgotten without much of a fight. Her conflicts within the show seem the most juvenile, like being obsessed with her virginity in the first season, leading the other characters to dismiss her often.
I think that these characters’ relatability is why fans of the show dislike them so much. It is hard to see so much of yourself on screen, to notice your idiosyncrasies within other people. When your friends tell you that you’re just like a character who sings a melancholic cover of Kanye West’s “Stronger” at an ex’s work party (Marnie), it’s hard not to be offended. Oftentimes when people describe the main characters of this show in particular, they lead with their most negative traits. Hannah is selfish, Marnie is overbearing, Jessa is flaky, and Shoshanna is a pushover. But Girls reminds us that we, like these characters, are not just our flaws. We’re complex and three-dimensional. Our twenties are about fucking up, figuring ourselves out, and moving on.
Girls is also a great depiction of how a friend group interacts and changes during their twenties. It embraces the absurdity of becoming a “real adult.” It discusses love, sexuality, addiction, grief, heartbreak, and mental illness in a way that is both heartbreakingly realistic and laughably lighthearted. Girls is the perfect show for anyone in their twenties. There is comfort in knowing that no matter what, you are not alone and you are not the first to feel this way. No matter what kind of day you’re having, Hannah Horvath is having a worse one.