HBO's Girls : gender, generation, and quality television

The HBO series Girls, created by and starring filmmaker Lena Dunham, has been praised for revealing the uncertainties and contradictions produced by the apparent independence of many contemporary young women. It has also been condemned for focusing on girls who use that independence for self-indulgent complaint and celebrate their own objectification. Both feminist and not-so-feminist responses to its promotion, and to the subsequent success of the series, have debated its generationalized gender politics and its narratives about socioeconomic privilege and insecurity. Debating whether Girls has something new and vital to say about girls has thus taken up now longstanding refrains about ‘postfeminism’ and ‘girl power’. This essay considers this controversy, evidently anticipated by the series' producers and argues that understanding Girls requires situating it within HBO's stable of ‘quality’ but controversial original programming, within which Girls' provocative version of feminist girlhood serves as part of its ‘quality’ manipulation of popular conventions for narrative television.