by Joy Press
When Dunham sat down with HBO execs to discuss developing a series, she had no idea how to pitch anything. “I went in and said, ‘Here’s the kind of show I want to see and haven’t seen on TV,’ ” she says. “I went on a tirade about my friends and the kinds of problems they were dealing with as twenty-something women, trying to navigate the social landscape that was totally reliant on texting and Facebook. I overshared about my own relationship foibles, and I was like, ‘Which of my friends hasn’t been on Ritalin since they were twelve?’ ”
Her artfully artless TMI riff excited Naegel and her younger HBO colleague Kathleen McCaffrey; it seemed to encapsulate a quicksilver millennial sensibility. These characters, Dunham promised, are “your girlfriends and daughters and sisters and employees.”
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Sex and the City is an obvious antecedent for Girls: a (mostly) female-written show centered on female characters unapologetically pursuing their desires and ambitions on the small screen. It was HBO’s first Zeitgeist-defining hit, yet the network mystifyingly failed to follow the mammoth success of Sex and the City with further original programming aimed at (or created by) women. A decade after launching Carrie Bradshaw and Company, HBO had aired only a handful of series with female characters at the center: The Comeback, a mockumentary starring Lisa Kudrow, from Sex and the City creator Michael Patrick King; Tracey Ullman’s sketch-comedy series Tracey Takes On; and The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, a coproduction with the BBC. There were even fewer scripted series created by women in HBO’s archives.
According to Alan Sepinwall’s book The Revolution Was Televised, in the late nineties, HBO considered buying a TV series by My So-Called Life creator Winnie Holzman about a female toy executive; ultimately the network decided to greenlight The Sopranos instead. Who knows where the path not taken would have led, but in the early years of the twenty-first century, a rogue’s gallery of wayward alpha men dominated the cable landscape. HBO largely defined the genre, thanks to melancholy Tony Soprano and his brutal mob crew; profane Deadwood bordello owner Al Swearengen; and The Wire’s gay drug-dealing outlaw Omar Little. Sure, some of these dramas had splendid female supporting characters—shout out to Carmela Soprano, Trixie the Whore, and Kima Greggs—but it was those brooding male antiheroes who dominated the dialogue and drove the story lines.
Troubled and tempestuous, the men of HBO ushered in the modern golden age: television as epic narrative that could be binge-watched; television as a creative haven for art house film directors and ambitious screenwriters; television as a force field surrounded by auteur-focused criticism and forensically in-depth reviews.
“The thing that was concerning to me was, every time there was a female-lead show that worked, no one wanted to repeat it,” says Naegle, who arrived at HBO in 2008, after having been an agent to many female showrunners, including Roseanne scribes Eileen Heisler and DeAnn Heline and Sex and the City’s Jenny Bicks. Naegle says that in the 1990s and early 2000s, “Many many many times, male presidents of networks said to me, ‘We won’t put out a show with a lead female on the air. They don’t make money; no one wants to watch them.’ I would argue, ‘A lot of women watch television. In my house, my mom determined what we all watched. Why wouldn’t she want to see a female-lead show?’ ”
By 2010, HBO’s big draws, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and The Wire, were done, and the cupboard was bare. Entertainment blogs frequently buzzed about female-oriented projects in development at the network from young writers such as Julie Klausner, Mara Altman, and Sloane Crosley. There were whispers of a women’s studies professor drama from Theresa Rebeck; a sixties groupie series by Jill Soloway; and a comedy about an aging feminist icon created by Marti Noxon. None of them made it to air. Naegle says the lack of women on HBO wasn’t for lack of her trying: “I was reconnecting with people like Jenni [Konner] and all these great female directors, trying to find shows. . . . Even if you set out to find a certain kind of programming, you can’t will it.”
Watching Tiny Furniture for the first time in her cabin that summer, Naegle fell in love with Lena Dunham’s work. And because this young woman had already written, directed, and starred in a low-budget film, HBO execs could see how her show would look and feel.
“We told them, ‘This is going to be Tiny Furniture but funnier and with more girls,’ ” says Konner, who quickly jumped on board as co-showrunner to help steer an inexperienced Dunham through the process. When Judd Apatow got wind of the project and asked to be involved, Naegle hesitated for a second. “I really love Judd, and he has mentored so many incredible writers, but at that moment, I was like, ‘No no no no no!’ ” she says, laughing. “I just thought, Let’s not mess with this too much.” But Konner knew that both Apatow’s creative vision and his marketplace clout, in the wake of Knocked Up and Bridesmaids, could only help the series.
Shrewdly, Apatow moved quickly to circumvent any expectations on HBO’s part that Girls would be an extension of the low-budget approach of Tiny Furniture. “There was a moment when they might’ve said, ‘Wow, this girl works really cheap!’ ” he recalls, in reference to the film’s fifty-thousand-dollar budget. Instead, Apatow insisted from the start that they wanted the show “to look like Sex and the City. We are going to shoot in New York and we want the same budget as all your big New York shows.”
The pilot of The Untitled Lena Dunham Project pivoted around aspiring writer Hannah Horvath and her best friends, Jessa and Marnie. An odd combination of uncrushable self-confidence and wry self-deprecation, Hannah “feels like she deserves praise she’s not getting while thinking she doesn’t deserve anything. It’s the trademark of many Jewish comedians, but it is sort of a new thing to see in a girl that age,” says Dunham, who is half-Jewish. That was the jarring originality of Hannah as a character: a sad sack quality melded with cringe-inducing obnoxiousness inside the body of a young woman.
And that body—well, the remarkable thing about it was that it was so unremarkable. Not fat, just defiantly imperfect. As in Tiny Furniture, Dunham was compulsive about exposing it in ways that were more mundane and ungainly than HBO audiences were used to seeing. Nudity was likely to involve unsexy scenarios such as sitting on the toilet or eating a cupcake in the bathtub.
Konner says they built something like thirty bathroom sets over the years “because we don’t stop the scene when someone goes into the bathroom, we don’t cut away when she takes her shirt off or puts her shirt on. We see all the awkward moments of life.” The sex scenes are, if anything, even less titillating: in the pilot, Hannah shows up at the Brooklyn apartment of her eccentric sex buddy, Adam. Ordering her onto her hands and knees on his threadbare couch, Adam seems oblivious to Hannah’s pleasure (or, rather, lack of it). As Hannah chatters anxiously, trying to get feedback on his desires, Adam snaps, “Let’s play the quiet game.”
Everything about Girls’s approach felt abrasively surprising, like experiencing the world from a yoga position that is both enlightening and borderline unpleasant. At the center of this attraction/repulsion vortex is Hannah and her ever-shifting relationships with her friends—love affairs of a sort, freighted with unspoken aggression, jealousy, and dependency. The audience first sees Marnie asleep, her plastic mouth guard poking out of her lips as she sweetly spoons roommate Hannah. They conked out while watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show, a nod to the young independent single women of the 1970s from the young can’t-get-their-careers-started women of the 2010s.
Knowing that comparisons to the single ladies of Sex and the City were inevitable, Dunham derailed them with a metareference in the pilot. Shoshanna, originally described as “a JAP in velour sweats,” sizes up Jessa as “a Carrie with some Samantha aspects and Charlotte hair.” Jessa, a British wild child, proves her immense cool by disdainfully replying that she has never watched the HBO show. Despite the shared focus on four young women in New York City, ramshackle Girls felt miles away from high-gloss Sex and the City. In Hannah’s Brooklyn universe, messy adventure al
ways trumped monied glamour. There were no gigantic shoe closets or suave heroes here. As Dunham once joked at a television critics conference, “[My boyfriend] in the pilot is not Mr. Big. He literally does not have bedsheets!”
Naegle recalls having very few critiques of Dunham’s pilot script: “There was a voice and a tone that were so specific, we just didn’t want to play around with it.” HBO’s one big note, she says, involved Hannah’s relationship with her parents, a pair of midwestern academics. “We all felt it needed a breaking point to propel the character forward,” she says. Apatow suggested Hannah’s parents announce they will no longer subsidize her, forcing their daughter to look for a job in the midst of America’s deep recession.
“I think I might be the voice of my generation,” she protests to them, trying to win back financial support. “Or at least a voice. Of a generation.” Hannah is zonked on opium tea when she announces this, but she is at least half-serious. It was the kind of self-satirizing dialogue that Dunham tossed off gleefully, perhaps unaware that her show would soon trigger an avalanche of think pieces, many devoted to unpacking questions such as: How dare Lena Dunham suggest that she is the voice of her generation?
In the last scene in the pilot, Hannah wakes up in her parents’ empty hotel room. Before leaving, she steals the tip they have left behind for the maid. We have been warned: Girls is going to make it hard for us to like these young women.
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HBO agreed to let Dunham play Hannah, much to her agent’s surprise. And she had written the role of Jessa for close friend Jemima Kirke, the delicately beautiful daughter of a rock star and an interior designer, who had already appeared in Tiny Furniture in a similar role. Kirke was a painter with no interest in acting, even if the part was inspired by her own personality. She also had just given birth to daughter Rafaella.
“Jemima was like, ‘I just had a kid; I’m not going to be on your TV show!’ ” recalls casting director Jennifer Euston. Dunham eventually coaxed Kirke into shooting the pilot just six weeks after she gave birth; she would later have to coax her again when Kirke tried to quit just before the start of season two.
For Marnie, Hannah’s conventionally pretty, tightly wound best friend who works as an art gallery assistant, they settled on recent college graduate Allison Williams, best known then for a YouTube video in which she sings over the Mad Men theme song, and for being anchorman Brian Williams’s daughter. Shoshanna was originally written as a secondary role, a slightly older party girl. Many actresses auditioned for the part, including comedian Amy Schumer. But after watching a tape of twenty-three-year-old Zosia Mamet (daughter of playwright David and actress Lindsay Crouse), Dunham decided to change Shoshanna into a loopier, college-age virgin.
“Once Zosia took on that character, she created something that was not on the page at all,” Euston recalls. “So then they decided, the show is not going to be about three girls; it’s going to be about four.”
When asked why the core of her cast consisted of children of famous people from the arts and media, Dunham tells me that she “didn’t think about it at the time. The only thing that would make it not a coincidence is that they came in with a preternatural willingness to play and an understanding of the creative process that probably comes from being raised around it.” After pausing for a moment to think, she adds, “Allison has a poise that is in the best way very newscaster’s daughter,” while Zosia “came in and brought all this nuance. It comes from her talent and also a lifetime of watching people make interesting things. And Jemima was my best friend in high school, and she was always the apotheosis of the coolest girl. To be able to capture that but also its flip side—the struggle of the cool girl who can’t express her fears because her whole self-defense is carefreeness and nonchalance, that was an interesting thing to explore with her.”
As for the boys in Girls, Dunham knew she wanted to cast her Tiny Furniture costar Alex Karpovsky as Ray. A slightly older guy, Ray would end up being the show’s moral compass. Christopher Abbott was perfect for Charlie, Marnie’s slavishly adoring boyfriend. But Dunham had no one in mind for Adam, Hannah’s perturbing boyfriend. On the first day of casting, Jen Euston scheduled three actors to audition for the role. One of them was Adam Driver, a hulking, Juilliard-trained former marine whom Euston had unsuccessfully pushed for roles in various movies she had cast.
“Nobody would hire him because of the way he looked and because he was . . . unusual,” Euston says of Driver, with his huge beak of a nose and sepulchral air. Looking at headshots before the session, Euston says Dunham and Konner held up his photo and mocked it. “I said, ‘Just wait, okay?’ ” Driver walked in and took possession of the casting session.
“It was a tiny room full of women, and he is gigantic,” Konner recalls. “He was reading the part, and he was physical with Lena; he was grabbing her. It was like one of those old recordings of the Beatles where you can’t hear them because all the girls are screaming—you can barely hear the audition because we were all . . .” Konner starts pretending to hyperventilate. Although Adam was originally intended to be a fleeting character, the producers knew Driver needed to be a permanent fixture. “I said on day one, we have a young Brando, we have a young De Niro. Everyone saw it,” Konner says. Sure enough, within a few years, Driver was cast as Kylo Ren in the Star Wars saga and starring in movies by Jim Jarmusch, Steven Soderbergh, and Martin Scorsese.
From the moment he steps into the frame in the pilot, Driver exudes a kind of mesmerizing deviance, a sense of emotions so volatile they might explode. Dunham says Adam’s character was initially inspired by a macho guy she dated pre-Girls who “was into building things,” which charmed her. “The flip side was he had a lot of unexpressed pain and anger.”
Driver is such a compelling actor, Dunham admits, that he made Adam almost too loveable, such that “there is no way you are going to watch the show and not come away feeling affectionately toward him.” And yet she always intended for him to have a whisper of unpredictable violence about him, which comes out throughout the show’s run. “My goal was never to suggest, ‘This is the kind of boyfriend you should want!’ I was always urging people to think critically about the kind of character he was.”
Dunham went into Girls with an indie filmmaker’s approach: she knew how to direct actors and manage a small crew, but being a television showrunner meant learning to use a writers’ room. In addition to Konner and Apatow, the team included New Yorker cartoonist and Six Feet Under writer Bruce Eric Kaplan, New York magazine journalist Deborah Schoeneman, Vice columnist Lesley Arfin, and young fiction writer Sarah Heyward. Dunham says she initially turned to them more for their life experiences than for their writing skills. “A lot of [the scripts] came from our lives. ‘This happened to me. Ohmigod this happened to you?’ Why have we never seen this on television, these common female experiences? Some of them sexual . . . but also about friendship or trying to do well at your job or humiliations. Tension with friends, living in a weird cramped space with your friend and her boyfriend, and watching their relationship dissolve.”
Yet Dunham found it hard to collaborate at the start. Although the writers’ room spent a lot of time getting themselves into a collective mind-set (absorbing female coming-of-age novels such as Mary McCarthy’s The Group and movies such as Party Girl), Dunham wrote a half-season’s worth of episodes mostly by herself. “I was so used to going into a cave and doing it on my own. I totally believed in the concept of an auteur. But television is a people’s medium, and you want to enrich your show with other people’s voices.” Konner saw it as part of her job to school her young partner in the art of delegation—if for no other reason than, as Konner joked at the time, “She’s only twenty-five, and at a certain point she’s going to run out of stories because she hasn’t had time to live them.”
Arranged marriages of creative minds don’t always work in television (as we saw earlier with Roseanne). Dunham and Konner came from different generations and different
coasts. Dunham was the child of New York City artists, Konner the LA daughter of two TV writers, Lawrence Konner (The Sopranos) and Ronnie Wenker-Konner (Cagney & Lacey). Yet the women bonded immediately, forging a relationship that would reach beyond Girls. “It’s very rare that people become close friends and they find their rhythm as creative people,” marvels Apatow. “[T]here are literally zero power struggles or creative wars between them.”
It helped that they’d all agreed Dunham had the final say on decisions, and that Konner and Apatow saw it as part of their job to look out for her well-being. “Lena certainly benefited from the fact that Jenni and I had so many really difficult experiences, and so we were able to anticipate everything that could go wrong,” Apatow suggests. “We were able to say, here’s what the controversies will probably be.”
Dunham struggled to name the series. She wanted to signal the idea that these young women in their early twenties did not yet think of themselves as adults. She kept coming up with cute titles along the lines of Girls Like Us or Those Crazy Girls! Eventually, Apatow suggested they keep it simple and call the show Girls. The title stuck.
A year passed between the start of filming on Girls and the show’s premiere in April 2012. In the interim, those edgy “girl” comedies created by women (New Girl, 2 Broke Girls, Don’t Trust the B—, Whitney) materialized on network television. But it turns out that all that worrying about “peak vagina” was premature: Girls took female trouble to a new level. Instead of using genitals as sassy punch lines, Dunham’s dramedy emphasized graphically awkward sex and real talk about real-looking bodies.