You can stop blaming Lena Dunham now

“Are you watching Lena Dunham’s new show?”

This text from a colleague flashed up on my phone early last week, and for a moment, I wondered if it was an errant missive rerouted from 2018, the last time a prestige-cable show was attached to Dunham’s name. Then I remembered: Yes, I had heard about this show. But the way I’d heard about it was so low-key, so normal that I didn’t register its direct connection to the most hated woman on the internet. Where were the exasperated think pieces bemoaning the fact that Dunham is still relevant? Was it even a legitimate Dunham news cycle without snide social-media posts recapping every embarrassing overshare, clueless interview answer, or racist transgression in the actor-director-producer’s career? If Lena Dunham returns to our screens and social media doesn’t burst into flame, is it really her?

Apparently, it is. Thirteen years after “Girls” first aired on HBO, TV’s most dreaded, doubted and dunked-on creator is back with a new show (Netflix’s “Too Much”), a new alter ego (Megan Stalter’s Jessica Salmon) and a slew of new chances to make us cringe so hard and so repeatedly that it technically counts as exercise. “Too Much” has all the classic Dunham elements: An unfiltered chaos-agent protagonist constantly getting in her own way, a big-city setting, an inscrutable love interest, jarringly realistic sex scenes and impeccable needle drops from Funkadelic and Lil’ Kim to John Cale and Richard and Linda Thompson. The fact that it’s prompted so little discussion, much less outrage, is a measure of just how much the landscape of televised pop culture has changed in those 13 years.

Back in 2012, “Girls” marked HBO’s first female-led series since “Sex and the City” wrapped and was all the more anticipated because of its precocious creator. Dunham, who started making films as an undergraduate, was 23 when her first full-length film, “Tiny Furniture,” won the Narrative Feature prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. A first-time TV creator with A-list mentorship from Judd Apatow and a wunderkind narrative, Dunham was hyped to the skies with nowhere to go but down. And as soon as “Girls” premiered that spring, people made sure she did: Somewhere between the opening titles and closing credits of “Girls”’ first episode, hating Lena Dunham became as much a staple of online life as cat memes.

In 2012, “Girls” wasn’t the first or the only small-screen series created by and starring women; alongside “2 Broke Girls” and “Don’t Trust the B— in Apartment 23,” it wasn’t even the only one set in one of New York City’s five boroughs. But HBO, at the time still the premier prestige-cable network, threw a wealth of resources toward marketing it not only as a defining show for millennial women, but as a way for older generations to “understand the youth.” The period before and after the show’s debut was awash in reviews and think pieces that treated “Girls” as less a show than a manifesto, and Dunham as either a millennial Marlin Perkins leading older viewers through a baffling landscape of twentysomethings or an entitled upstart who deluded HBO into believing she had something to say. And sometimes both at once.

A startling number of critics and viewers were convinced that the first-episode scene in which Dunham’s Hannah Horvath begs her parents to continue their financial support for her writing career, declaiming while zooted on opium tea that she “might be the voice of a generation,” was a sincere statement of purpose rather than a deft self-skewering. Plenty of mainstream reviewers had no problem picking up what “Girls” was putting down. But looking back at some of the more pearl-clutching receptions, it’s embarrassingly clear that more than a few otherwise smart writers deployed high-level disingenuity in their attempts to stack the deck against Dunham.

How else to explain reviews like the one from Mother Jones titled “What the Hell Was HBO Thinking?” that called Hannah Horvath “an unsympathetic victim of First World Problems who mumbles her way through a Brooklynite’s perdition of unpaid internships and missed orgasms” as though that wasn’t exactly what the show intended to portray? Or the piece in Tablet that accused “Girls” of not only being “a poorly made show; it’s a poorly made moral decision, a decision to remain at the still point of the turning world and retreat into a world that’s hardly larger than a Brooklyn neighborhood where no one has any sense of agency or urgency or dignity or grace.” How to parse the performative outrage of online snarkers taking every opportunity to accuse Dunham and her costars of being nepotism hires who deserved none of their plaudits?

(Yes, each of the show’s leads had notable parents, but the way that people accustomed to a showbiz sphere of Fondas, Barrymores, Hustons, Stillers and Coppolas sniped about the “Girls” cast suggested that everyone knew the niche-famous assemblage of artists, news anchors, and ’70s arena-rock drummers who spawned them.)

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Once on the air, the show activated two diametrically opposed and equally loud groups. One was an old-school, pale-male contingent of industry professionals who couldn’t imagine TV focused on women offering anything more than period jokes, and who recoiled at the idea of sex scenes involving people they weren’t attracted to. This was typified by the executive producer of “Two And a Half Men” complaining to The Hollywood Reporter that TV was “approaching peak vagina,” and by Howard Stern, who called Dunham a “little fat girl” and likened her frequent nudity to “a rape.” (Stern backtracked in 2013 after “Girls” won the Golden Globe for Best Comedy Series, saying that he hoped Dunham hadn’t “[gotten] the impression that I think she’s just a talentless little fat chick.”)

The other faction was social-media users who, in theory, wanted to see more and better representations of women in pop culture, but who also felt an ethical duty to call out anything that could be considered, in the parlance of that time, “problematic.” Their valid concerns, like the absence of any characters of color in the series’ first season, were often undercut by the actual problem, which was that nearly everything getting called out — the lack of diversity, the nepo-lite casting, the framing of one person’s experience as a generational one — was stated as exclusive to Lena Dunham rather than endemic to the industry. In some of the critical reactions to “Girls,” there was a curious amount of insistence that Dunham thought her show was a lovable chronicle of awesome and aspirational young people. 

There was an element of the soft bigotry of low expectations in this response. TV history primed us to believe that any show depicting more than one woman — or more than one Black person, or more than one Asian person — was a shorthand depiction of that group as a whole. And HBO hadn’t released a show about a group of women friends in a big city since 1999, when “Sex and the City” made the scene. So if “Girls” wasn’t meant to be a junior “SATC,” tidily characterizing its roles into sexpot and careerist and girly-girl throwback (something the first episode gently mocked), how were viewers supposed to make sense of it?

(StillMoving.Net for Netflix) Lena Dunham attends the Netflix Special Screening of “Too Much” on June 23rd, 2025, in London.

Dunham herself could have done more to help “Girls” overcome the assumption that it was meant to be a generation-defining story. She tried, initially, explaining on ‘Fresh Air” that she didn’t feel equipped to portray characters of color (“I always want to avoid rendering an experience I can’t speak to accurately”) and noting that she “wanted to avoid . . . tokenism in casting.” She also spoke warily about learning to talk to media and “realiz[ing] it’s not the same as sitting in a seminar talking things through at Oberlin. Every quote is sort of used and misused and placed and misplaced.” As a self-admitted oversharer, Dunham’s relationship with click-driven media was always chancy, but as time went on, she became a walking PR crisis, each incident of thoughtlessness, blithe privilege, or casual racism building on the last one to construct an increasingly messy public persona.

You could argue that “Girls” stumbled so that a more diverse, wide-ranging slate of small-screen women could run: With every new season (there were six in total), it was joined by more shows, both network and cable, that had women creators, majority-women casts, and a tacit rejection of the idea that any TV show could or should encapsulate the experiences of a single gender or race or age group. And by the mid-2010s, a proliferation of streaming services meant that TV series no longer lived and died by ad buys and marquee names. Platforms like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime could take chances on shows that spoke to a broader range of demographics. A message that should have already been made explicit — that no one show can be everything to everyone — was finally getting the kind of support and investment it needed to break through.

The result was enough women-made, women-fronted content to make the vagina-panic guy’s head explode, if anyone cared enough to check: “Orange Is the New Black” (which premiered in 2013) supersized the ensemble cast; “Insecure” (2016) continued the legacy of “Living Single” and “Girlfriends.” “Broad City” (2014) and “Fleabag” (2016) fleshed out the absurdist dimensions of young women figuring themselves out; “Chewing Gum” (2015), “Vida” (2018), “Unorthodox” (2020) and “We Are Ladyparts” (2021) centered experiential lenses of religion and culture. “PEN15” (2019) and “Sex Education” (2019) made sexual comings-of-age as affecting as they were awkward.

It’s into this world that “Too Much” dropped, with none of the frenzied promotion or juiced-up expectations that impacted “Girls” — which makes the show feel less consequential and more enjoyable even as it explores similar territory. More social-media platforms mean less centralized call-out campaigns; a crumbling monoculture makes for fewer anointings of voices of a generation. Older and wiser, if not always more filtered, Dunham still has a killer ear for dialogue and a sharp self-awareness in crafting exasperating characters that you truly hope will learn from their recurring unforced errors. And she remains a gift to her dedicated haters — still unfiltered and eternally frustrating, still discomfiting people who resent great taste in packaging they don’t want to look at.