But then, if everyone is rewatching Girls in 2023—and according to my social circle and the results of a cursory Twitter search, everyone really is—could it really have been so bad?
I did a little digging to see if I could find out why people were rewatching the show, beyond the reasons for rewatching anything (nostalgia and a morbid curiosity about whether or not it has “aged well”). Maybe there was some online call to action—a pithy tweet, or a pointed mention in a viral New York Magazine piece. When Twitter failed to deliver, I scoured Google Trends, hoping to find a loose thread that would lead me to the genesis of the renewed Girls interest, but came up empty. Unsurprisingly, HBO didn’t return a request for comment about the show’s viewership numbers, so there was no way to tell when—or even if—everyone started rewatching Girls at a specific moment in time.
So I went straight to the original source: I asked Anna why she’d decided to revisit New York’s most famous millennial foursome.
“My best friend told me she was rewatching and recommended I give it a try,” Anna tells me later over Slack. “Soon after I was walking through Central Park and remembered the episode ‘The Panic in Central Park,’ the one where Marnie has a chance encounter with Charlie and they spend the day together. I thought of it fondly, so it motivated me to start my rewatch.”
Similarly, Clara, who lives in Philly, was inspired by a friend to give the HBO show another go. “My friend Mark (who I met in college!) was rewatching, and I’m a sucker for a nostalgic, feel-good show with short episodes,” she said over text.
The picture of the people rewatching Girls was coming into sharper focus: They are all 30-something millennials who first watched the show when it aired, and who were drawn to Girls then because they were Girls (in the ungendered sense of the term). And then they grew up.
I was 19 when the first season premiered, a freshman in college working part time at Urban Outfitters and pining for Life in the Big City. Girls gave me a glimpse into my near future, painting a picture of a reality that was at once more boring—but also, somehow, more exciting—than any other portrait of life in New York, from Friends to Gossip Girl to Sex and the City. It felt real.
I may have told myself that I was hate-watching the series to keep up with the musings of the James Francos of the world, but in reality Girls was alluring because it was a mirror of my and my peers’ messy inner lives: We were Hannahs, Marnies, Jessas, and Shoshannas, and we dated the Adams, the Desis, the Charlies. We were still in school or recently graduated, and we had no idea what to do with our lives. (“I was studying sociology and French,” recalls Clara. “I didn’t know what I was going to do.”) We filled the existential voids with friendships and sex and flailing attempts at realizing our dreams. We had bad takes. We resisted the urge to defend the show—at the risk of outing ourselves as versions of these shitty characters—and instead leaned into the seemingly intellectual take-downs. At least, that’s what I did.
