The Gen-Z Girls resurgence trend had me confused. Why are people already returning to the HBO series—didn’t the show’s finale just air? But if the popularity of the HBO Girls Rewatch podcast tells me anything, it’s that I’m old it’s already time to look back on the juggernaut—the show and the Lena Dunham of it all. See, I moved to Brooklyn in 2012 a couple years after college. Girls , a show about a group of grads living in Brooklyn in their early twenties, premiered in April 2012. I was Girls . Girls was me. Would that still apply now that I’m no longer a fledgling 20-something in Brooklyn myself? Apparently, I had to find out. And so, I, a millennial, jumped on the bandwagon and started a rewatch myself.
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It’s amazing how in the pilot alone, the then 25-year-old Lena Dunham—showrunner, writer, director, star—nailed so much. Rewatching in a city far from my old Williamsburg haunts, it felt as if I were viewing a home movie. I could smell the Greenpoint air. From the jump, the show captured what being a young white person in north Brooklyn was like in the mid-aughts. This wasn’t Carrie Bradshaw’s New York. We were recession grads who couldn’t afford Manhattan, but working in an art gallery a la Charlotte York was still a possibility. Dunham had the rare ability to see the forest for the trees, poking fun at hipster culture while depicting the truth of that particular moment in time. In a scene where Hannah Horvath, Dunham’s character, is high on opiates procured from a legal flower shop (thanks, Ray), she implores her parents to continue to financially support her as she completes the next great American novel: “I don’t want to freak you out, but I think that I may be the voice of my generation. Or at least, a voice of a generation,” she says. As I bicycle my 9-month-old’s legs waiting for a call from the pediatrician regarding infant constipation, I think: “This is a perfect moment of comedy.”