This year for Thanksgiving, I gave thanks for all kinds of things, from my corgi’s upcoming leg-healing surgery to Mother India’s perfect butter chicken recipe. But it was the day after Thanksgiving that yielded the most precious 2026 gift of all: the announcement that “Girls” is coming back next year.
And for that, may we all be truly thankful.
HBO Max dropped a short video-chat sketch late Tuesday afternoon featuring “Girls” creator Lena Dunham on a video call with stars Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke and Zosia Mamet about spending next summer shooting five new episodes of the show. All of them agreed, including latecomer Andrew Rannells. It’s an enthusiastic yes from me, too, along with scores of other millennials and TV fans in general who are sorely in need of Dunham’s small-screen mastery right about now.
“Girls” got a ton of press during its run from 2012 to 2017: Dunham was overseeing a high-profile HBO show at age 26; Dunham was not super-skinny; Dunham was unafraid to cast herself as an oft-annoying Brooklyn hipster with hot boyfriends and flings (remember the Patrick Wilson controversy?). There was also the fact that it was really, really good. The writing was sharp. The jokes were hilarious. The acting was sublime.
And, perhaps most importantly, it captured how it felt to be young in the 2010s, when everything still seemed possible and bright and not that serious. By the show’s 2017 finale, things had gotten a little more serious, thanks to Trump’s rise and the explosion of the #MeToo movement later that year.
We didn’t really know how good we had it. Dunham made it feel not only possible but probable that scores of other young female showrunners could follow in her stead, creating messy female characters, casting non-skinny leads. Being, as Hannah Horvath famously said in the pilot, “a voice of a generation.”
But TV stars remained rail-thin. Studios were loath to give out blind development deals to weird 20-something girls, especially given how easy it is to hit the wrong tone with a 30-minute dramedy — or not be funny (just look at the show billed as “Girls” in Los Angeles, “I Love LA”). And Dunham was so destroyed by the constant criticism of her body that she decamped for England and barely made anything for years. Her return to great TV with “Too Much” made us love “Too Much” … but also realize just how much we missed “Girls.”
It was only 14 years ago, but the “Girls” era of the 2010s might as well be a different century. Back then, we only had Trump’s first term to fear, rather than enduring a second. We only had the usual commenters’ rancid jokes about Dunham’s body, not the constant onslaught of blatant and brutal misogyny everywhere from Ivy League campuses to the “Saturday Night Live” monologue. We only had the rise of annoying content creators versus the ominous omnipresence of AI. Back then, Hannah’s issues of rotating roomies and making rent from random writing gigs feel positively quaint given the bleak hellscape most young people face today, employment-wise and housing-wise.
It makes sense that the shows that came out around this time have been surging in popularity of late. Fans were rapturous about the “30 Rock” reunion this past weekend, bemoaning the fact that it was not televised, begging on X for any scraps of gossip about the proceedings and showing off their event merch. And social media continues to be filled with posts about people starting “The Americans” in droves. Both shows feel like simpler times, whether it’s the joke-packed screwball comedy of the former or the old-fashioned spy thriller of the latter.
The people yearn for good writing, unique voices, indelible characters — and “Girls,” unlike so many current shows, has those. “Too Much” and her critically acclaimed new memoir “Famesick” show that Dunham’s still got it. Normally, it’d be easy to bemoan a talented creator returning to their greatest triumph, to worry they’re coasting on nostalgia or looking for an easy paycheck. But Dunham is still sharp, still smart, still hilarious. And she is staying true to her proclamation that she’d only return once “there was a specific story we were burning to tell.”
This “Girls” reunion is doubly exciting because it gives this skilled storyteller the chance to explore how her very millennial characters are handling the decidedly un-millennial modern times. Did Hannah become a helicopter parent to young Grover? Did Marnie become a right-wing TikTok influencer? And what the hell is Adam up to?! Even Dunham’s own plumper modern-day size is a balm for curvy gals like me: she was breaking ground as a mid-size lead then, and she’ll be breaking ground as a plus-size mama now.
It feels good to have something — anything — to look forward to these days. And I am thankful that Dunham’s greatest work could lie ahead of her, not behind her.
