Girls
GIRLS／ガールズ
Storyline
The whole story, ending included.
Brooklyn twenty-somethings and sex filmed without flattery; Dunham's body on screen was a weekly argument.
Two years out of Oberlin College, Hannah Horvath, who wants to be a writer, is told by her parents that they will no longer pay for her life in Brooklyn. She and her friends stumble through their twenties: Marnie, her poised best friend and roommate, stuck with a devoted boyfriend she no longer wants; Jessa, a bohemian British wanderer; and Jessa's American cousin Shoshanna, a fast-talking New York University student embarrassed to still be a virgin. Hannah's on-and-off lover is Adam, an intense, sober carpenter and actor.
Over six seasons the four drift. Hannah's teenage obsessive-compulsive disorder returns under the pressure of a book deadline, and Adam comes back to look after her. She writes an e-book, works at GQ, goes to the Iowa Writers' Workshop and comes home to find Adam living with another woman. She becomes a substitute teacher and dates a colleague, Fran. Jessa's short marriage ends, she goes through rehab, and she begins a relationship with Adam that leads to an explosive falling-out with Hannah. Marnie marries her musical partner, Desi, then leaves him. Shoshanna works in Japan and comes back sure that her friendship with the others has held her back.
In the final season Hannah publishes an essay about Jessa and Adam in the New York Times. A celebrated novelist she has accused of coercing students into sex summons her to his flat, disarms her with flattery and then manipulates her into touching him. On a magazine assignment at a surf camp she has a brief affair with her instructor, Paul-Louis, and learns she is pregnant; she decides to have the baby, and Paul-Louis says he is not ready to be a father. Adam offers to raise the child with her. For one day they plan a life together; by nightfall both see, in tears, that the feeling has gone, and he goes back to Jessa. Hannah takes a teaching job at a college upstate. At Shoshanna's engagement party, to which Hannah was not invited, Shoshanna tells the others she no longer wants to be their friend. Hannah and Jessa make peace, the four dance, each alone, and Hannah leaves the city.
Five months later Marnie has moved upstate to help. Hannah's son, Grover, will not breastfeed, and Hannah, exhausted, rages at Marnie and at her mother, Loreen. Storming out, she tries to rescue a half-dressed teenage girl who turns out to be running away from her homework, and in scolding her understands something about being a mother. She comes home to Marnie and Loreen on the porch. When Grover cries in the night she tries again, and he latches.
Starring
Lena Dunhamas Hannah Horvath
An aspiring writer in Brooklyn, cut off by her parents, self-absorbed and funny, who makes her mistakes one at a time.
Hannah Horvath’s story
Hannah drifts between jobs and men, and a row with Marnie ends with Marnie moving out. When her obsessive-compulsive disorder returns under an e-book deadline, Adam comes back to look after her. She works at GQ, leaves for the Iowa Writers' Workshop and returns to find Adam with another woman; she becomes a substitute teacher, dates a colleague, Fran, and breaks with Jessa when Jessa takes up with Adam. A celebrated novelist she has accused in print of coercing students manipulates her into touching him. Pregnant after a fling with a surf instructor, she spends one day planning a family with Adam before both see the feeling has gone. Teaching upstate, she rages when her son, Grover, will not feed and storms out, then comes home and tries again until he latches.
Allison Williamsas Marnie Michaels
Hannah's composed best friend and roommate, whose careful plans for love and a singing career keep collapsing.
Marnie Michaels’s story
Marnie leaves Charlie, the devoted boyfriend she no longer wants, then loses her gallery job, becomes a club hostess and chases an artist who does not think they are dating. She decides to sing, wins Charlie back and loses him again, and a video they made goes online to her humiliation. She sleeps with Ray, forms a duo with Adam's co-star Desi while he still has a girlfriend, and marries him. She leaves him, tours with him anyway, and finds he has been addicted to painkillers for a year; Ray, tired of her self-absorption, ends things with her. Evicted, her jewellery worthless, she decides to move back to her mother's, and then asks to move upstate with Hannah to help raise the baby. The last night finds her on the porch beside Hannah's mother.
Jemima Kirkeas Jessa Johansson
A brash, bohemian British friend whose brief marriage ends, who goes through rehab and falls for Hannah's ex, Adam.
Jessa Johansson’s story
Jessa comes back to New York thinking she is pregnant, skips her abortion appointment and finds she is not. At a party billed as a mystery she marries Thomas-John, a venture capitalist she and Marnie met in a bar. After a vicious row with him and a visit to the father who neglected her, she vanishes, leaving Hannah stranded. Divorced, she is thrown out of rehab, relapses, and is called a junkie by Shoshanna. She pulls Adam into her chaos, later falls for him, and breaks with Hannah over it; he offers to pay for her to go back to college. Making a film with him about his time with Hannah, she fears he still loves Hannah; after one day planning a family with Hannah, he returns to Jessa. At Shoshanna's engagement party she and Hannah make peace.
Zosia Mametas Shoshanna Shapiro
Jessa's fast-talking cousin, a student at first ashamed of her virginity, who grows out of the group.
Shoshanna Shapiro’s story
In an abortion clinic's waiting room Shoshanna admits to Marnie that she is a virgin; she smokes crack by accident at a party and later loses her virginity to Ray. They date, but she cheats and ends it, citing his age and lack of ambition, and he cuts her off. She fails to graduate on time, learns that Marnie has slept with Ray, graduates after summer classes and botches interviews. Dating Scott, she takes a job in Tokyo and leaves him waiting at the airport when she stays. She comes back, revives Ray's coffee shop and is hired there. Reproached by college friends she dropped, she decides that Hannah, Marnie and Jessa have held her back, and at her engagement party tells them she no longer wants to be friends. The four dance, each alone.
Adam Driveras Adam Sackler
An intense, sober carpenter and actor whose relationship with Hannah turns serious, breaks down and keeps pulling him back.
Alex Karpovskyas Ray Ploshansky
The sardonic manager of the café where Hannah works, who becomes involved first with Shoshanna and then with Marnie.
Why it matters
Girls showed young women's sex and bodies without the flattering light television usually supplies: awkward, funny, sometimes humiliating, often bad. Lena Dunham drew the premise from her own life, and the conversation about Hannah's body, and Dunham's, was one the show never tried to end by covering up. Its real subject is self-absorption, and it is honest about how unlikeable its heroines can be; the friendship that is supposed to be the centre of the story quietly dissolves, and one of the four finally says so. Its sharpest episode, in the last season, sets Hannah against a celebrated novelist accused of coercing students into sex and shows how easily power turns a conversation about consent into one more instance of the problem. It won the Golden Globe for best comedy series, and in 2019 the Guardian ranked it eighteenth among the century's best television. It leaves Hannah where no one expected her: alone with a baby, learning to feed him.