Lena Dunham is back with a new series. Here's why she's so divisive

A year or so ago, I was hanging out with two friends when one of them started raving about this obscure series she'd just stumbled on — Girls.

"And did you know one of them actually wrote the show?" said Gen Z friend continued. "Maybe it was Hannah?"

I wordlessly locked eyes with my other friend, a fellow millennial, as we came to the shocking realisation that a key piece of our history had already been forgotten.

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The unflinching early 2010s comedy-drama, which Lena Dunham wrote, directed and starred in, followed four 20-something white women as they struggled to form meaningful relationships while trying and failing to make it in New York City.

Hannah (Dunham), Marnie (Allison Williams), Jessa (Jemima Kirke) and Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) were each distinct but ultimately of the same ilk: privileged, mediocre, cringeworthy and incapable of seeing themselves accurately.

Over six seasons, Girls attracted rave reviews and intense scrutiny, but my friend's oblivious TV recommendation made one thing clear: this new generation didn't view Girls with the same lens we were forced to look through.

They didn't see Dunham's rise and fall from grace in real time.

They could simply watch her most famous creation today and see it, completely separated from the artist, as a genius satirical representative of millennial narcissism and post-2008 recession malaise.

To mark Dunham's return to scripted TV with her new show Too Much, we look back at how she, for better or worse, became the voice of a generation.

Girls premiered in April 2012 to rave reviews heralding Dunham as a wunderkind.

Jessica Ford, a senior lecturer in media at the University of Adelaide who has written extensively on the show and Dunham, says it was "a watershed moment in American television".

"A lot of people responded to seeing a version of millennial, urban life on screen that wasn't aspirational like Sex and the City," she says.

"I think the appeal was that it was mundane and lowkey in its approach, and deeply ironic; it was both portraying these characters and critiquing them."

Imelda Whelehan, professor emeritus at the University of Western Australia who specialises in popular culture and feminism and co-edited a 2017 collection of essays about Girls, agrees.

"There were interesting vignettes of good and bad relationships, and how they don't stay the same," she says.

"[Girls] also picked up on issues common to feminists for a long time around the 'ideal' feminine body, the way women are perceived, and it broke through conventions around depictions of women."

Despite rave reviews and soaring ratings, Dunham and her TV show were loathed as much as they were loved in the 2010s.

From its first season, Girls fielded criticism over its lack of racial diversity — which its creative team defended.

Dr Ford thinks this critique was valid, "considering this was a show set in New York".

But, she quips: "The idea we want Lena Dunham to write Black people should have been refuted with that whole 'Donald Glover [as a Republican]' storyline, which proved she's not the right person to write those stories."

And prof Whelehan says there were plenty of people who felt "confronted by the way Dunham performed Hannah [and what some saw as] her 'random acts of nudity'".

"People were also vexed by the portrayals of sex and the idea that all the characters were unlikeable and obsessively focused on themselves, even though it was very knowingly doing that," she adds.

But perhaps the series' biggest sticking point was its creator.

Dunham, who had pitched Girls as a semi-autobiographical series aged just 23, was conflated with her obnoxious character Hannah from the moment the series started airing.

"For so long, people were, like, 'You are Hannah. Hannah is you.' They had no sense that there was any level of satire in it," Dunham told The New Yorker last year.

Dr Ford says this is something we've long been trained to do as audiences: "I Love Lucy is the proto example — we've been doing this for 70-odd years."

But she thinks it was particularly fervent when it came to Dunham: a young woman telling a version of her own niche story. She was increasingly perceived as over-hyped, over-privileged, and the spokesperson for women no-one asked for as a result of her show's generic name.

It became more of a problem as Dunham started attracting bad press.

An incident with her sister, recounted in Dunham's 2014 memoir Not That Kind of Girl, was interpreted as child abuse. Dunham rejected this. Then, in 2017, she accused a woman of lying about being raped.

Prof Whelehan and Dr Ford say the conflation of Hannah and an increasingly tactless Dunham meant the satire of Girls was lost.

"It was taken at face value instead of as an experimentation of thinking through the limitations and the problems with being a white woman in that era," Dr Ford says.

Both experts think misogyny had something to do with this — though neither of them excuse the things Dunham has said or done.

Around the time that Gen Z friend of mine started watching Girls for the first time, a whole bunch of other people were consuming it too.

A spokesperson for HBO told The New York Times Girls' viewership doubled between November 2022 and January 2023 compared with the previous three months.

Recap podcasts started cropping up, from Girls Room to Girls Rewatch, and the discourse shifted online.

Girls was no longer a love-hate watch, but a series to unironically enjoy. Hannah and Marnie weren't cringeworthy beyond belief, but deserving of adoration.

Dr Ford thinks the Girls resurgence has a lot to do with the fact we've managed to get some distance; today's viewers see it as an absurd time capsule that never needed to be everything or speak for everyone.

"I'm guessing people watching it now would be in their late teens [and above], thinking about what their own lives might look like post-recession, amid continuing world conflict, and [thinking] they have been sold short of their dreams too," Prof Whelehan adds.

A lot has changed for Dunham since Girls wrapped in 2017.

Long-term romantic and creative partnerships have ended, and she's swapped New York for London, where she married her husband, Luis Felber, in 2021.

She's spoken of how her body was treated as an "object of scorn" after she bared it on Girls, and opened up about her experience with chronic illness.

But while she's continued making film and TV, she's veered away from the personal.

Until now.

Dunham's new Netflix series Too Much, co-created with Felber, marks her return to the semi-autobiographical genre.

This time it's a rom-com loosely based on her and Felber's love story, and follows Jessica Salmon (played by Hacks breakout Meg Stalter), a 30-something New Yorker with a similar foot-in-mouth tendency to Hannah.

Jess runs away to London with her hairless dog Astrid after being dumped by her insufferable boyfriend (Michael Zegen) and feeling unfulfilled at work.

She imagines her new life will look like the "British" Jones Diaries. But she can only afford an ex-council flat with no soundproofing, and her one romantic prospect is a failing musician with substance use issues named Felix (Will Sharpe).

Jess and Felix almost immediately enter into an extremely co-dependent relationship despite the red flags and the fact there's a lot they seem to dislike about one another.

When asked about the decision not to star in the series, Dunham told The New Yorker last year: "I think sometimes when people associate you so recently with another character, they're not able to see [you as a new one]."

She also decided she wasn't up for having her body "dissected" again.

Dunham appears in the show as Jessica's dramatic older sister Nora, who is largely unable to get out of bed following her own recent break-up with husband Jameson (Girls star Andrew Rannells). It's a wink to her own oeuvre — and it's not the only one.

But while it marks a return to her roots, Dunham's new show feels lacking, in many ways, of the realism and lo-fi grit of her HBO debut. It goes too heavy on the Netflix look. And Too Much struggles to depict believable people of colour despite all the backlash Dunham faced over this with Girls.

Even so, it has moments of brilliance, in the dialogue-driven exploration of the millennial experience, and in its sex scenes, which are just as unflinching and raw as Girls'.

If Girls was about how deeply uncomfortable it is to be a mediocre woman in your twenties, Too Much is about how that trend continues into your 30s, and how you try to make it work and be with the people you've chosen while sorting through your baggage — good idea or not.

This ultimately does not make for a very romantic or funny watch.

But, after 13 years of considering and reconsidering Dunham and her creations, at least it's immediately clear that was the intention.

Too Much is streaming now on Netflix.