Warning: Spoilers ahead from the “Girls” series finale
You’ve come a long way, Hannah.
But boy, did it take you a while.
HBO’s “Girls” wrapped up its six-season run Sunday night with a finale that disappointed some fans, but gave its “voice of a generation” millennial star, Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham), the character development she desperately needed.
When “Girls” first premiered in 2012, it was heralded as an unflinching look at what it’s like to be a young woman in New York City. To those like myself in Dunham’s peer group, those early episodes rang cringingly real: the struggle to make a career as a writer, the crappy apartments, the terrible sexual encounters. For a generation of millennial women weaned on the glittery excess of “Sex and the City,” “Girls” was the harsh reality of what happens when life falls far short of that dreamy ideal.
But as the series went on, it increasingly drew the ire of millennials whom it sought to portray on screen. While the characters of Hannah, Marnie (Allison Williams), Jessa (Jemima Kirke) and Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) aged, their problems largely stayed the same. Long past the point where any actual young New Yorker would have been forced to sell out for a paycheck, the “Girls” remained in a perpetual state of arrested development, refusing to stick with any position that didn’t fit into their neat “dream job” box. They seemed physically incapable of thinking about anyone other than themselves, despite numerous episodes showing the pitfalls of such a mindset. And while courtship of the under-30 set in New York is dominated by online dating and an allergy to long-term commitment, the relationships on “Girls” proceeded with nary a Tinder swipe — and not one, but two characters involved in quickie marriages.
In short, as its audience matured and its characters didn’t, the series became harder to identify with.
In its final episodes, however, “Girls” took steps to bridge this reality gap. Last week’s penultimate episode, which played more like a traditional finale, saw the recently engaged Shoshanna encourage the three other girls to “call it” on their friendship and acknowledge they hadn’t actually acted like true friends in quite some time. It was an all-too-honest moment that recognized people grow apart, and that your friends in your 20s aren’t always your friends for life.
Sunday’s actual series finale served as an epilogue, a five-month time jump that set Hannah off into her new life as a single mother working as a writing professor in upstate New York. My annoyance with this season’s pregnancy plot point aside, having a baby forced “Girls” to end the only way it (successfully) could: with Hannah finally growing up.
It’s not an easy transformation, as we find Hannah starting to lose it as she struggles to breast-feed her infant son, Grover, which sees her fall back on her go-to move of playing the victim when things get tough. Hannah’s mother, Loreen (Becky Ann Baker), who was this episode’s MVP, sums it up best when she admonishes her daughter for claiming her own baby hates her.
“You made a choice to have this child, and guess what? It’s the first one you can’t take back,” she says. “You can’t get your tuition refunded, you can’t break the lease, you can’t delete his phone number. Your son is not a temp job, he’s not Adam. This is it, honey, and this is forever.”
It’s that bit of tough love — and a run-in with a bratty teen on a walk around the neighborhood — that forces Hannah to return home and finally accept the true selfless responsibility of motherhood. In the end, it turns out the thing that made this self-centered millennial finally care about another person was literally growing one inside her.
Maybe, Hannah, you’re gonna make it after all.