Lena Dunham is returning to the role of Hannah Horvath in a seventh season of "Girls," roughly a decade after the show's final episode aired, according to Aftonbladet. The Swedish outlet reports that the revival has drawn warm reactions from celebrities both in Sweden and internationally.
Allison Williams returns as Marnie, Jemima Kirke as Jessa, Zosia Mamet as Shoshanna and Andrew Rannells as Elijah, Aftonbladet reports. HBO has said that in the new season Dunham turns her attention from the turmoil of the twenties to the milestone of turning 40, according to the outlet.
"Girls" originally ran from 2012 to 2017 and followed a group of friends in their twenties navigating work, romance and friendships in New York City.
Why it matters
Reviving a series that defined a particular moment in television is a gamble, and the audience that grew up with these characters has aged alongside them. The question of how a show built on youthful messiness handles its characters' middle years sits at the center of the new season, and early fan reaction suggests that is exactly where expectations are highest.
A fan's hopes for the new season
Photographer and influencer Stella Cocozza, 33, is one of the show's devoted followers and told Aftonbladet she has high expectations for the coming episodes.
She said she most wants the series to hold on to the honesty and uncomfortable humor that made it work in the first place — that it should still be allowed to be ugly, selfish, embarrassing and contradictory. She does not want the characters to have sorted out their lives and become well-adjusted adults, adding that such an outcome would not be entertaining at all.
Cocozza acknowledged that the characters have grown older, but said she hopes that does not push the series toward centering on things like raising children. She admitted it might sound harsh, but said she sincerely hopes the focus does not land on children and family life. In her view, one of the show's best qualities was that life did not always turn out as planned, and she hopes the characters have not fallen into a template of how things are supposed to be.
She said she was drawn to the series because it stood apart from other shows. It did not try to make its characters especially likable or present them as better people than they were, she told Aftonbladet. She likes that it is both funny and dark, and that it embraces the imperfect in everything it does — and that viewers recognize things in it they would rather not admit about themselves. She said "Girls" holds a particular place in her heart.
Where the characters might be now
Cocozza offered her own guesses about what has become of the four friends.
With Hannah, she sees it as an even split between two possibilities: either an overprotective mother who does everything for her son, or someone as self-absorbed as before who more or less lets her parents raise the child. She also suspects Hannah has sold the house and moved back to New York.
Marnie, in her view, is probably still chasing a perfect life. It likely looks flawless on the surface — a large Manhattan apartment, a handsome and successful husband — while she tries to break through as some kind of influencer and become a new Martha Stewart.
She hopes Jessa has found a bit more calm, though she finds it hard to picture her as an entirely ordinary and stable person.
Shoshanna, she expects, will have the steadiest life of the group: living upstate with her husband and at least two children while building a flourishing career.
Asked about favorite moments, Cocozza called the choice difficult. She settled on the scene where Hannah learns that her ex Elijah has come out as gay and the two start arguing in a restaurant, which she called a piece of gold-standard dialogue. She also named nearly every scene in which Marnie performs solo for an audience, and the moment when Hannah and Elijah crash Marnie's date's apartment in sheer neon-green tank tops and scold her for being a bad friend.
What to watch
The seventh season brings back its core cast under Dunham, with HBO framing the story around the characters approaching 40. How the show balances that older vantage point against the messiness its fans associate with it will be the thing to watch when the new episodes arrive.
