Girls: Lena Dunham Makes The Girls Grow Up Girls was such a pop-culture phenomenon when it premiered in 2012—the subject of hundreds, thousands of think-pieces about this new, millennial-minded approach to television-making—that it was sometimes hard to experience it for what it was: a sitcom about some pals and their friends and lovers. In the fifth-season HBO premiere, we get Girls with a bracing clarity: creator Lena Dunham goes for more laughs, more tender moments, and we don’t have to always think about what this show is telling us about The Way We Live Now.
