In the pilot for HBO’s “Girls,” its petulant protagonist Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham) declares to her TV parents that she is “the voice of my generation — or at least a voice, of a generation.”
As the show airs its sixth and final season, which premiered Sunday, millennial New York women are split as to whether Dunham accurately portrayed their generation.
Kavita Parekh, 20, says the show is so representative of her life that she and her roommates re-watched all five seasons in preparation for the final one.
“It’s like someone is articulating a feeling you have but don’t have the words for,” says the Alphabet City resident and NYU student. “Like when Marnie [Allison Williams] says things like, ‘I don’t know what my next week is going to look like, let alone my next year.’ I’ve felt that fear so much.”
Laurel Sager, a 23-year-old Bushwick resident, says she also relates to the characters and has learned a lot from them over the seasons.
“The show has taught me to love the muddle that is becoming an adult and feeling like you’re doing everything wrong,” says Sager, who works in TV production.
The show has taught me to love the muddle that is becoming an adult and feeling like you’re doing everything wrong.
- 'Girls' fan Laurel Sager
Others say that they see little of themselves in the Brooklyn misadventures of Hannah and her dysfunctional squad of self-absorbed 20-somethings: free-spirited Jessa (Jemima Kirke), Type-A Marnie (Williams) and the hyperactive achiever, Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet).
“My life is spent working, so to watch people who just hang out all the time and are just always getting brunch — that’s just not something I identify with,” says Samantha Stallard, a 28-year-old marketing manager living on the Upper West Side. She found the episode in which Hannah quits a marketing job because it conflicts with her writing especially cringe-worthy.
Julianne Neely, a screenwriter, also had issues with the show, but notes she was rooting for its success because of its frank portrayal of sex.
“Women [with] different shapes are still sexual beings, so [showing that] helped de-stigmatize it,” says Neely, 24 and a Staten Island native enrolled in the same writer’s workshop in Iowa that Dunham’s character dabbled in during the show’s fourth season.
Nuria Francis, a 23-year-old African-American student living in Crown Heights, says that the show’s lack of diversity rubbed her the wrong way. “There are not that many people like me on [it],” she says. “[Hannah Horvath] wasn’t the voice of anything to me.”
Even Parekh, a die-hard fan, admits that the show has given her generation a bad rap.
“Everything I do is to make sure I’m not looked at [the way the characters on ‘Girls’] are portrayed, and it’s very exhausting,” says Parekh. “When you see Hannah being so obsessed with herself, you wanna scream.”