In my review of Girls’ fourth season, I commented on both the cheapness and the necessity of its bookending time-jump. Lena Dunham’s half-hour series had trapped itself in vicious cycles of punishing character development and claustrophobic storylines, to the point where it was hard to envision a legitimate narrative recovery. The time-jump, in turn, highlighted that very problem – that of go-nowhere plots and stuck-in-place characters – while also signaling a potential corrective. Indeed, the prospects of Hannah (Dunham) in a healthy new relationship with co-worker Fran (Jake Lacy); Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) trying out a life in Tokyo; and Jessa (Jemima Kirke) working towards becoming a therapist were all infinitely more compelling than what had been introduced, and not so tidily wrapped-up, previously.
Yet upon its return for season five, Girls seemed to be repeating past mistakes: inelegant episodic constructions, main character hook-ups for the sake of it, refusal to dispose of Desi, Marnie’s opaquely insufferable love interest (easily the gravest offense). I’d stuck with Dunham and her show for some time, out of adoration for what she'd achieved in Girls’ early days and respect for her continued engagement with complex perspectives on friendship and adulthood. But there’s no denying that a spark was lost somewhere along the way – that, in-part because this was Dunham’s first major television gig of any kind, the show seemed to be lacking in the longevity department. Despite the potential brought about by the time-jump, I wasn’t expecting Girls to turn the corner it so desperately needed to.
But then, amazingly, it did.
This is not to say that Girls went from awful to great, or even bad to good. The show had consistently proven capable of exceptional scenes, engaging arcs and provocative humor, even in its later years. On my part at least, there’d never been any denying of Dunham’s talent or unique voice; in reading various critics and witnessing Girls’ journey in real-time, I’d say the consensus was that Dunham had struggled to pull her characters’ stories together as the characters themselves began drifting apart. Scenes between the splintering group felt increasingly strained, while their increased time apart rendered episodes less cohesive. Dunham was rarely comfortable with episodic splicing anyway, and so the direction of her narrative only pressured her more deeply to artfully connect a handful of bite-sized plotlines. Predictably, then, the results were often ineffective.
This, above all else, seems to be what Dunham figured out. This year, her characters’ emotional journeys were invigorated by random bump-ins – Marnie, after fighting with Desi, running into her ex-boyfriend Charlie (Christopher Abbott), and Hannah, after a string of personal defeats, into her relatively successful college rival Tally (the great Jenny Slate) – that dominated the season’s sixth and ninth episodes, respectively. Yet these experiences went unmentioned in their aftermath, and are likely to stay that way; their implicit significance is far greater, and no less clear, than that of two former Girls characters returning to the fray. The Marnie-centric “The Panic in Central Park” blossomed like a New York love story before dimming like a New York reality check. The season’s penultimate episode, “Love Stories,” centered on Hannah’s delightful afternoon with her former nemesis, and in turn on a surprisingly transformative moment of self-actualization.
Girls once again realized the maddening magic of its location and, more importantly, how its core cast fits into that milieu. The fifth season captured the City’s penchant for spontaneity, with the spellbinding unpredictability of “Central Park” and the sustained joyfulness of “Love Stories” particularly locked in its urbanized mystique. (Charlie and Marnie hit up an upscale Midtown Italian restaurant, while Hannah and Tally chowed down at a Brooklyn hot dog joint.) Around them, stories filled out along similar lines: Shoshanna’s dream life in Tokyo turning sour due to a sense of displacement; Elijah’s (Andrew Rannells) affair with a public personality emerging as an uneasy foray into New York’s wealthy-queer subculture; and Hannah’s parents, Loreen (Becky Ann Baker) and Tad (Peter Scolari), coming to terms with the new stage of their lives as well as the burden of the city’s limitless possibilities. By focusing on common threads relative to her characters and her setting, Dunham enriched her storytelling methods as Girls had never seen before.
The show also benefited from the promise of finality; HBO and Dunham jointly announced at the top of the year that Girls would be ending in 2017, and that final-act shift was palpable as the fifth season rolled on. Particularly, the re-introductions of Charlie to Marnie, and Tally to Hannah, stood out because they demonstrated how dramatically the Girls had grown, however imperfectly and unevenly. Rightly, they felt on the brink of adulthood – improved in their habits and conceptions of responsibility, but no less hampered by their difficult personalities or ambiguous envisionments of the future. (That goes for the men too, particularly Elijah and Adam Driver’s Adam.) In the season’s eighth episode, Hannah – after a breakdown that should go down as one of her worst, a feat given her history – hitchhiked her way from upstate back to the city. She went through the usual picked-up-by-the-side-of-the-road stages of emotion – thankfulness, terror and reluctant acceptance – before finally connecting with the man: a Nevada resident running from an abusive relationship, beautifully blinded by the promise of New York. He shrieked with excitement as he witnessed the skyline for the first time, and Hannah could only smile in response. It was her home, after all, that elicited such optimism. That kept a wounded man going.
The smile said a lot about Dunham’s growth as a storyteller. It appeared, at once, like a monumental character moment conveyed without a word, and an encompassing acknowledgment of the thematic terrain she’d been exploring. Girls began as a distinct, visually ambitious and verbally audacious look at a quartet of women, navigating the Big City in their post-college years, finally off of their parents’ dime and left to (sort of) fend for themselves. Five years later, it felt as if Dunham herself realized just how far she’d pushed her characters, and her initial idea – with a refined visual palette, a reclaiming of her specifically millennial poetry and a newfound goal of an endgame, Girls grew up.
There was a moment in the season finale when Elijah, heartbroken once more and prospects uncertain as ever, rested his head on the shoulder of Loreen, left alone yet again by her newly-out (and, thus, newly-curious) husband. Elijah lamented to her, “I’ll never do anything with my life,” before Loreen echoed the sentiment about herself. Here were two messed-up people coming out of painful experiences, without a positive thought to cling onto. But they laughed together, anyway, under the city streetlights and after a year of heartache. The underlying message: sometimes you have to cringe your way backward to laugh your way forward. To its great benefit, Girls finally did just that.