Girls has never been about women being kind to their friends – not really. Way back in the pilot, which premiered in 2012, the titular characters – Hannah, Jessa, Marnie and Shoshanna – were already being rude to each other, showing up hours late to a dinner party that they didn’t much care about. Throughout the years of the show, occasional moments of sweetness between the foursome have been overshadowed by arguments and cruelties. With the final episode of the show airing on Sunday, is the overarching lesson of the six seasons of this groundbreaking and ostensibly feminist show that women’s friendships are difficult, or even toxic?

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Last week’s episode made it seem like this might be so. Trying to decide whether she should move out of Brooklyn to take a job teaching at a college upstate, Hannah found that none of her longstanding “friends” were willing to take her calls: Marnie didn’t return her voicemails; Shoshanna had changed her number. Now in a relationship with Hannah’s ex-boyfriend, Adam, Jessa didn’t merit a phone call. When the women finally had a showdown – a “group meeting”, as Marnie imperiously called it, overlooking the fact that they are not really a group – at a party in the episode’s final scenes, it was clear that they were no longer friends with each other. Looking at the show as a whole, however, it’s questionable whether they ever were in the first place.

There’s much to be said for the comedy that Lena Dunham and her co-writers plumbed from the seething jealousies and loathings between their main characters. Ruined weddings, meltdowns over shared apartments, parties and vacations and nights out, all destroyed by women shouting “You’re a bad friend!” or variations thereof at each other. And yet the show continued to depict the women as bonded together by something that was supposed to resemble friendship: at the beginning of this season, a long montage showed them all savoring a Modern Love column by Hannah in the New York Times, even though some of them were no longer speaking to her and all of them had said in all kinds of ways that they found her despicable.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hannah (Lena Dunham) and Jessa (Jemima Kirke) in season five. Photograph: Mark Schafer/Paul Schiraldi Photography

Indeed, by this stage in the show’s six-year run, it seems unlikely that they would have anything to do with each other at all, much less that Hannah would have no other friends to call when facing a big life decision and would not have gotten to know anyone else over the course of her years in New York as her original group of friends drifted (or sprinted) away. “Hannah, you’ve made so many wonderful friendships here,” her roommate Elijah says of her time in New York, and they laugh and laugh at the preposterousness of the idea. Or maybe at the fact that this could never be portrayed in the show because of contractual obligations to the original cast.

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For women who have, well, actual friendships with women, this seems disingenuous, if not a little insulting. Girls might have been an opportunity to make a show that portrayed the genuine importance of friendships between women: the crucial role that they play in our lives, their ebbs and flows, the way they can morph over time from the intensity of college friendships to the more laid-back but still loving connections of our late 20s and 30s. Instead, Girls reduced women’s friendships to their most negative stereotypes: selfishness, narcissism, a willingness to throw other women under the bus when sex with a man is in the offing.

Girls didn’t always achieve all of its feminist aims, and in particular fell short when it came to intersectionality, but at its best, such as this season’s episode American Bitch, it brilliantly illuminated some important aspects of women’s experiences that television and film have often ignored. It was watchable and entertaining and sometimes hilarious. In all of these respects, it will stand the test of time when we look back on this golden age of television. But it won’t be remembered as a show about friendship.