Everybody Was Too Annoyed With Lena Dunham To Appreciate 'Girls'

That was a world where we were still grappling with the advent of social media, which was still primarily used for telling everyone what you had for lunch. You could get famous for having a weird-looking cat, and a “hot take” was probably some kind of shoplifting slang. It was the first time a global platform was available to anyone with basic computing skills, so for a few years there, we all shared way too much information about ourselves. Everyone was indulging in the kind of self-involved, confessional-style storytelling that temporarily made someone like Dunham seem normal.

Then, right around the time Girls premiered, we all woke up from our solipsistic blackouts, except Dunham never did. Social media became a place to share and, more importantly, argue about news, the more sensational, the better, and Dunham is nothing if not sensational, in the “burning” sense of the word.

Suddenly, the team behind the show had to guide their premise to a conclusion under the harsh scrutiny of hordes of critics while its creator continually put her foot in it. And they mostly did a pretty good job. There are a thousand ways their response to criticism of the show’s lack of diversity—casting Donald Glover to make out with Dunham and insist that she’s actually too sensitive to racial issues for a whopping two episodes—could have gone wrong, and while it ultimately fell short, they did make Hannah’s privilege and fragility the unquestionable punchline.

It’s probably no coincidence that a season four storyline involved the normalization of abortion, an issue that Dunham would later famously reveal was near and dear to her tactless heart, and handled it an order of magnitude better than she did. If you’ve ever worked for that kind of Michael Scottish person, where you had to anticipate all the ways they might accidentally bring the ship down and put up metaphorical baby gates around them, you know how hard that must have been.

Ultimately, what brought the ship down was ratings. Despite the media circus, the show never managed to pull more than about a million viewers. (By comparison, HBO’s crowning jewel, Game of Thrones, was averaging nearly 12 million by the end.) Everyone was criticizing it, but nobody was watching it.

Now, with Hollywood somehow producing new scandals faster than the trending algorithms can process them, it’s hard to understand why “Girls think piece season” was ever a thing. It was a show about screwups who eventually maybe stopped screwing up quite so much, and if it was anyone else’s brainchild, it would have limped along, safely ignorable by anyone outside of its tiny audience.

Today, it’s a time capsule from an unrecognizable decade past: once upon a time, Netflix sent you DVDs in the mail, Obama wore a tan suit, and a half-hour sitcom about a bunch of underemployed Oberlin graduates was somehow fodder for breathless national discourse.

Top image: HBO