Apparently, growing up does not mean we have heard the last of Hannah Horvath. HBO announced on Oct. 13 that Girls will return for a limited run of five episodes, bringing Lena Dunham and several familiar faces back together.
Production will begin in 2027, a decade after the original series ended. There is no confirmed premiere date yet, so the announcement is more an invitation to start your rewatch than a reason to clear your calendar. Still, five episodes leave plenty of room to speculate about what is to come.
Dunham will reprise her role as Hannah alongside Allison Williams as Marnie, Jemima Kirke as Jessa, and Zosia Mamet as Shoshanna. Andrew Rannells will also return as Elijah, while Judd Apatow is back as an executive producer.
Adam Driver was not included in the announcement, leaving his involvement unconfirmed. For now, fans will have to wait before adding Adam Sackler to their reunion expectations, but given the details of their volatile relationship in Dunham’s recent memoir, Famesick, a reunion between the two may be easier said than done.
In HBO’s announcement, Dunham explained that returning required a reason beyond just missing the characters.
“We always said we would only return to Girls if there was a specific story we were burning to tell.”
Lena Dunham
Girls originally followed young women navigating work, relationships, and friendship in New York City, running for six seasons from 2012 to 2017. Its characters could be selfish, frustrating, and painfully recognizable. Watching them as a college freshman felt nothing like receiving instructions for adulthood. It felt more like witnessing everything those instructions warned against. I remember wondering how anyone could make so many terrible decisions and still be so convinced they were right. Then again, that might be why the show works. It is a lot easier to recognize someone else’s bad habits than your own.
Of course, the world these girls are returning to looks quite different from the one they left behind. The original series became something of a cultural time capsule, capturing the particular anxieties of young women who were convinced they were destined for greatness but faced brutal failure. But what happens when those same women approach middle age? How have their lives changed since we last saw them? Perhaps the most interesting, and most scary, possibility is that none of them have changed quite as much as they would like to believe. After all, Girls was never that interested in giving its characters sweet and easy personal transformations. Instead, it preferred showing just how difficult and messy growing up could be.
Now a decade after the finale, revisiting these characters creates an entirely different set of possibilities. Five episodes offer a chance to catch up without requiring these friendships to look exactly as they once did. Until more details arrive, the original series is available on HBO Max.
Whether you are revisiting it or meeting Hannah for the first time, consider this your warning: the girls are back. So give it a watch. All adventurous women do.