Ten years ago, we freaked out over Girls. Was the gal-pal show worth the hype?

Last month was the 10th anniversary of the debut of Girls, Lena Dunham’s lightning rod of an HBO show about the travails of post-university life for a quartet of young women in New York. That means this month is the 10th anniversary of people freaking out about Girls. The series, which concluded in 2017 after six seasons, was defined as much by what it said as what was said about it. The action and reaction were indivisible, which Dunham understood. Girls demanded your opinion; it was galvanising.

Recently I rewatched all 10 episodes of that first season from 2012. My initial response? It’s a very funny show and it has barely aged – but some of the criticism has. Girls was a narrative rich in self-awareness about characters – particularly Dunham’s Hannah Horvath – often strikingly bereft of self-awareness. “You are so self-involved,” the acerbic, unpredictable Jessa (Jemima Kirke) tells Hannah in the second episode, and the show’s refusal to gently fix that flaw, to have a growing moment, was honest but excruciating.

Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke, Lena Dunham and Zosia Mamet in season one of Girls, which debuted 10 years ago.Credit:

At the time I couldn’t get angry about Girls, and that hasn’t changed. It seemed clear that the specificity of the milieu – a Brooklyn of first jobs and so-so apartments that was the landing point of four middle- to upper-class white tertiary education women – allowed for the sting of the writing. This was a world that Dunham implicitly knew, and it contributed immensely to that first season. They were privileged and lived in a bubble. Token inclusiveness – which season two briefly and badly tried with Donald Glover – was the worst way to burst it.

For Hannah and Jessa, the perpetually uptight Marnie (Allison Williams) and their ratatat, impressionable junior partner Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet), their struggle to get by was secondary to their struggle to get along. Friendship is an impossible complex situation for the four of them, even in the first season. The friction is palpable at times – the throwdown argument between Hannah and Marnie that leads to the latter moving out of their apartment is awkward and illogical and rife with childish retorts and lacerating truths. It’s genuine.

The very first episode situated Girls as a continuation in a television lineage, with Shoshanna delivering a Sex and the City comparison to an unimpressed Jessa with a poster for the show prominent on her apartment wall, while Hannah and Marnie wake up in bed together having fallen asleep watching episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Yet the show was obviously a turning point for HBO and the idea of the television auteur. With executive producer Judd Apatow as a go-between, Dunham was a 24-year-old creator setting her own boundaries.

“He does sort of look like the original man” is how a character once described Adam (Adam Driver), pictured with Girls creator and star Lena Dunham.Credit:

As Louis C.K. did with the hugely influential Louis, which began in 2010, Girls brought independent cinema to network television (where it’s stayed ever since). Dunham’s hype began with her 2010 film festival feature Tiny Furniture, a proto-Girls experience complete with several cast members (it’s now streaming on Stan*). On Girls the slowly tightening camera shots during exchanges and stark editing of reaction shots push up against the prevailing visual grammar of the half-hour comedy. Creators such as Pamela Adlon (Better Things) and Glover (Atlanta) have been running with that freedom in the years since.

Girls could play with the recognised form, so that the Bushwick warehouse party episode on paper resembles a Friends outline where everyone has an adventure, except that Shoshanna smokes crack. Crucially, the show’s depiction of sex as an awkward, formative experience was telling. “Let’s play the quiet game,” Hannah’s on-off boyfriend, Adam (Adam Driver), tells her as he undresses her, exerting his control and clearly illustrating their troubled dynamic. Dunham’s instinct was to give more, not less, including how she chose to reveal her own body as a broadside against television convention.

“He does sort of look like the original man,” Jessa says of Adam upon her first sighting of him, and Driver’s casting – close to perfect – was the standout in a first season that nailed the supporting roles and guest slots: Chris O’Dowd, Jenny Slate and Kathryn Hahn are all exemplary. Dunham may have made a habit of screwing up in real life – see the lengthy “Controversies” section of her Wikipedia page – but Girls has such an assuredness to its first season. It’s intimate and accomplished, a heck of a starting point.

“I am busy trying to become who I am,” Hannah complains to her parents in the famous opening scene, where she flips out when they tell her they’re done paying her rent. That’s the mission statement for Girls – insular, but somehow also aggrieved. It makes for excruciating farce and jarring realisations, so that most times you think you have the storytelling pegged it doubles back on you. The first season of Girls can carry everything we threw at it and more. We were lucky to get it.

Girls is now streaming on Binge and Foxtel Now. * Stan is owned by Nine, the owner of this masthead.

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