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A voice of a generation has returned.
HBO has greenlit a revival of “Girls,” Lena Dunham’s beloved and controversial mid-aughts dramedy. The series will return for a limited, five-episode run with production beginning
in 2027 — a decade after the Season 6 finale.
“Girls” ran on HBO from 2012 to 2017. With Dunham as creator, showrunner and star, the original series followed a group of friends through the misery and dysfunction of their 20s in New York City. All four core cast members are returning for the revival: Dunham as Hannah Horvath, Allison Williams as Marnie Michaels, Jemima Kirke as Jessa Johansson and Zosia Mamet as Shoshanna Shapiro. Additionally, Andrew Rannells reprises the role of Elijah Krantz.
Judd Apatow returns as executive producer on behalf of Apatow Productions alongside Dunham, Ilene S. Landress and Michael P. Cohen of Dunham’s Good Thing Going banner. Williams, Kirke, Mamet and Rannells serve as co-executive producers.
“We always said we would only return to ‘Girls’ if there was a specific story we were burning to tell,” Dunham said in a statement. “I’ve missed these characters, but for a long time I couldn’t quite picture them in the present day. Then, right around my fortieth birthday, they started talking to me in the shower. And, as you may remember, once this fivesome starts talking it’s pretty hard to get them to stop… It’s rare that you get the chance to return to something that changed your life with the gift of hindsight and a whole new level of gratitude and understanding. I love these girls (and boy), our friends at HBO and all the people who have continued to discover the show and remind us afresh why we do this, which is the joy of being together… and the chance to wear yellow mesh…”
Dunham has expressed openness to the idea of reviving “Girls” multiple times over the years. Speaking to Variety in 2025, she said, “If we had something to say that was really specific and it was a moment in their lives where we felt like revisiting it — like millennial women becoming mothers or stepping into menopause or going to live at old-age homes — I would always want to work with those people again.”
Musing on each character’s fate, Dunham continued, “Shoshanna was married to, then divorced from, the mayor of New York City, and she runs an athleisure startup that’s zero-waste. Marnie — it’s third marriage. She still sings, but I think Marnie really needs to take it to Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. Jessa is unvaccinated and lives on a boat in Croatia. Adam is a cult theater actor, and he’s probably living in Berlin, and Ray is still on city council and running his coffee shop and doing better than anyone. Elijah is the fourth lead on a sitcom, making a good amount of money and still looking for love in all the wrong places.” About her own character, Dunham added, “She teaches at Bard and loves raising her son. She probably has a girlfriend who’s, like, a chef. And she’s less obsessed with being famous. That is where I feel that she would land.”
While it was a frequent topic of debate during its time on the air, “Girls” is often named one of the greatest television shows of all time, including by Variety in 2023: “The pilot positioned a quartet of downwardly mobile, alliteratively named New York millennials as a counterpoint to ‘Sex and the City,’ trading aspiration for closely observed cringe. That Dunham, just 26 when the show premiered, was so consistently conflated with her character is at once a product of misogyny and a testament to her performance.” The series, which earned 19 Emmy nominations and two wins during its run, has received significant renewed appreciation over the last few years.
Two names from the original “Girls” team were noticeably absent from HBO’s press release about the revival: Adam Driver, who starred as Hannah’s on-and-off love interest Adam, and co-showrunner and executive producer Jenni Konner. Dunham wrote about negative experiences with both of them in her memoir “Famesick,” released in April of this year.
She alleged that Driver was “verbally aggressive, condescending and physically imposing,” most notably recounting a story in which he threw a chair at a wall next to her because he was angry that she’d forgotten her lines. Driver also took liberties on set that made Dunham feel discomfort and a loss of control: When they filmed their first sex scene, “careful blocking went out the window and he hurled me this way and that,” she said. Driver also allegedly walked out the room when Dunham showed him the completed “Girls” pilot for the first time and ignored her calls for three weeks.
Konner was a close friend and mentor to Dunham in the early days of “Girls,” but their relationship soured as time passed. For example, Dunham wrote about feeling pressured by Konner to negotiate equal salaries, despite that Dunham created the series and appeared onscreen. When Dunham began to struggle with various health issues and procedures that affected her work schedule, Konner became cold and distant, according to the book. Dunham also wrote that she has no memory of her involvement in the joint statement she and Konner released in 2017 in which they defended “Girls” writer Murray Miller against Aurora Perrineau’s sexual assault allegations. The statement was drafted and published the day after Dunham returned from the hospital after having a hysterectomy, she noted, and she issued an apology shortly after.
The original “Girls” cast also included Christopher Abbott, Alex Karpovsky, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Jake Lacy and more.
“We’re thrilled to have Lena turn her gaze from the tumult of one’s twenties to the milestone of turning 40,” reads a statement from Amy Gravitt, executive vice president and head of HBO & HBO Max comedy programming. “To say the world has changed since we last saw Hannah, Marnie, Shoshanna, Jessa and Elijah is a massive understatement, but we know fans — old and new — will be happy to see how they’ve grown and relieved to see that they’re still the ‘Girls’ we knew way back when.”
