When it premiered on HBO in 2012, Lena Dunham‘s Girls — about the trials and tribulations of a squad of 20-something privileged, often self-involved friends in New York City — was the talk of the town, the subject of many thinkpieces, critiques and praise before it became a seminal series and eventual stand-in for Sex and the City for the Millennial woman.
Though the creator and star of the two-time Emmy-winning dramedy has previously acknowledged some of the show’s pitfalls, namely its lack of diversity, Dunham recently addressed a different kind of backlash she faced as Girls was on the air.
“I was always partially tuned into what people were saying,” Dunham began on a recent episode of the Girls Rewatch podcast. “I knew enough to know kind of the direction it was going — it was impossible to ignore — and I knew that people would tell me what it meant to them, but I also knew that there were people that were angry.”
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The creator of Netflix’s just-debuted Too Much explained that much of the ire stemmed from alt-right circles. Indeed, some of the backlash toward Girls included body-shaming and fatphobic comments from viewers, which Dunham has discussed in the past.
“There were so many people who, when the voices of — whatever we want to call it — really alt-right, or MAGA, or conservative voices, Proud Boys or whatever started to rise, and people were like, ‘I’m so shocked by the way people are talking.’ I was like, ‘I’m not,’” she said. “Those voices were in a comment section; I was experiencing those voices in 2012 in the way that there were so many angry seemingly men and some women dissecting the show in these incredibly conservative terms.”
With that, however, Dunham recognizes and accepts criticism from audiences who found the show’s titular girls’ lives “flippant and absurd” despite the series aiming to partially satirize “a certain kind of upper-middle class, upwardly mobile reality.”
“There were people in Brooklyn who found us irritating or liberal people who took issue with the access of the show, and I always had a lot more respect for that,” Dunham explained, “but there was also a big contingent of conservative people really looking at it as almost like evidence of a certain kind of moral decrepitude, and also making big judgments about our physical bodies, our sexualities. It was really interesting to realize kind of what a surprise that was to some people even in like 2016 or 2018 because it didn’t feel like a surprise to me.”
Reflecting on that, Dunham also said she felt the series came at a time where there was a narrow “window” of opportunity to make subversive or risqué television, which she alluded promptly closed amid the first Donald Trump era.