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‘Girls’ No More

HBO announced that Season 6 of ‘Girls,’ set to air in 2017, will conclude the series. Like it or not, the show about twentysomethings trying to make it in New York has been an undeniable hit.

by
Jonathan Zalman
January 07, 2016
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I’ve not watched ‘Girls’ in forever—I think I was aged out somewhere during Season 3—but I did enjoy it for quite some time. It served as a accompaniment to what I would see and hear of and sometimes feel in actual life as I edged through Brooklyn in the summer on my bike, riding up and down Franklin and Bedford Avenues, from Crown Heights to Greenpoint and back again. And maybe that was the show’s ultimate draw: viewers who felt an affection to the main characters weren’t quite sure if what they were watching a fantasy version of themselves. But they hoped it was true, and that makes for good fiction. “It’s a comedy,” wrote Emily Nussbaum in 2013. “A slight one, an odd one, an emotional one.”

As a dude, I distinctly recall being made to feel a bit paranoid about enjoying the show as though my gender precluded what I could and should watch. It seemed as though every time I’d talk to someone about liking ‘Girls’—a show primarily about hip females who do drugs, have weird and fun sex, and work through tough and new feelings and relationships—I was given the stink-eye. But haters, everywhere, as they say, gonna hate: don’t most New Yorkers in their twenties, regardless of the organs they were born with, do drugs and have weird sex and relationships while trying to figure out their purpose in life, and all the while make some money along the way, usually from parental units?

Season 5 of ‘Girls’ premieres on February 21, and this week, HBO announced that it had renewed the show for a 6th season, it’s final run. I won’t be watching, but I hope some people do, particularly those twentysomethings who are searching for a group of friends, led by Lena Dunham’s undeniable Hannah Horvath, with whom to vicariously make sense of this weird life, if even in an entitled way.

Jonathan Zalman is a writer and teacher based in Brooklyn.