Warning: this article contains spoilers of events in season six of Girls.



Girls, Lena Dunham’s HBO sitcom that was often more painful than laugh-out-loud, has come to an end after six seasons of redefining the way 20something women are depicted on television.

The final episode, which aired in the UK on Sky Atlantic on Monday night, showed Dunham’s Hannah five months after giving birth to her first child. She has been transplanted from Brooklyn to leafy upstate New York, having rejected a marriage proposal from Adam, her complex on-off boyfriend. We find her living with her old roommate Marnie, who is loosely helping to raise Grover while trying to find her own place in life and reminding Hannah of her lost independence.

Titled “latching”, the episode – written by Dunham, showrunner Jenni Konner and fellow executive producer Judd Apatow – revolved around Hannah’s difficulty in breastfeeding as she struggled to get Grover to “latch” on. It also saw her telling someone else to put their clothes on for once, when she lent her trousers to a teenage neighbour missing her own. It was quite a turn of events for a character who had spent most of the show’s six series talking and thinking about herself as she slept her way around New York.

The decision to regularly feature Dunham’s character in a state of undress despite her having a body that she has described as “chubby, portly, overweight” – in contrast to most of the other chracaters – has generated much debate since the show was first aired in 2012. Naturally, Girls ended with Hannah in the nude. “We can’t end the show with Lena with pants,” Konner told the LA Times. “You’ve got to start the way you finish, in some ways.”

“You are not getting away from this without full nudity,” said Dunham. “We choreographed that pretty carefully. Jenni was like, ‘This is Hannah now.’ And we painted little stretchmarks on my sides – we really wanted the body to tell the story of what she’s been through.”

One critic said the show failed to address how Hannah will approach raising a mixed-race child — her son was fathered by Paul-Louis, played by Riz Ahmed, a British actor of Pakistani origin. Girls has received criticism for its failure to reflect the multicultural nature of Brooklyn, because most of the main characters were white.

While Dunham’s show owed a debt to another HBO series focused on four white women, Sex and the City, the differences between the two shows are greater than their similarities. Jonathan Bernstein noted in the Guardian that the visibly flawed characters in Dunham’s series are far from aspirational: “Girls has proven to be the more adventurous, surprising and ultimately more influential TV programme.”

Girls has helped make possible a new wave of television, most notably Broad City, starring Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, as well as UK sitcoms such as Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum and Fleabag by Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

It is all the more remarkable that it has had such an impact despite notching up relatively small audiences – partly a reflection of its home on premium pay TV. Perhaps a broadcast network would never have given the green light to a show based around what Rebecca Nicholson describes as “brutally unglamorous depictions of sex and dating”.

She argues that Girls succeeded by straddling a delicate line, “making its core characters troubled, privileged and narcissistic – almost monsters, but never quite”.