In season one of Girls, Hannah (Lena Dunham) and Marnie (Alison Williams) are having a fight about whose problems they talk about more. Halfway through, Hannah snaps: “No one could ever hate me as much as I hate myself, OK? Any mean thing someone’s gonna think of to say about me, I’ve already said to me, about me, probably in the last half hour.”
Marnie’s response? “That is bullsh*t because I can literally think of a million mean things that have never once occurred to you.”
In fact, Marnie probably couldn’t even fathom the things that were being said about either of their characters. Along with their stumbling, fumbling screwed up sisters-in-arms, Jessa and Shoshanna, these girls became the lightning rod for everything that was wrong with millennial white women.
Routinely slated for being needy, narcissistic nobodies, they lurched through their twenties without a shred of grace or elegance as viewers looked on in horror. Because these weren’t the kind of endearing flaws previously sanctioned by TV – clumsiness, kookiness, a dodgy haircut. These were truly ugly foibles like immaturity, self-importance and anxiety. These women were, the world concluded, unlikeable.
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This week, it’s ten years since Girls premiered to a media storm that was equal parts celebration and criticism. In the decade since it has become almost impossible to separate the show from either its controversies or its creator.
As there were similarities between Lena Dunham and her character, Hannah, the two became interchangeable, with many people forgetting that the infamous “voice of a generation” line was written as a joke and spoken by a fictional character rather than Lena herself. Instead, the entire existence of Girls became repurposed as a coming of age story for a real person. Every mistake Lena made fed into the toxic discourse surrounding the show.
But with ten years’ distance, away from all the noise, the legacy of Girls transcends the cacophony of think pieces. For all the things it got wrong, or the limitations it ultimately placed upon itself with too narrow a worldview, the DNA of Girls – and specifically, the relatable antiheroine – permeated television forever, replicating and mutating time and time again in the years since.