Lena Dunham’s creative breakout came in the form of Tiny Furniture, an indie film about a young grad moving back home after college, and the imperfect, awkward early-20s. Following its success, Dunham wrote a pitch for a “tone poem about millennial life” for HBO, what she calls “the worst pitch you’ve ever read”.

In The Hollywood Reporter’s huge oral history on Girls, the actor, writer and activist discussed her “pretentious and horrifying” original idea for the seminal show. “I remember writing it, sitting on the floor listening to Tegan and Sara in my underwear, being like, ‘I’m a genius.’”

Casey Bloys, who was the head of comedy at HBO at the time that the then-23-year-old Dunham showed up with baby Girls, said: “There wasn’t a formal pitch, but because of Tiny Furniture, we all felt we had this very good blueprint for what a show might be.”

The pitch reads more like a declaration of existential crisis and privilege than a pitch for a major TV show with any sign of a plot or storyline. Dunham initially draws comparison between some of the biggest television series centred around groups of women:

“Sex and the City depicted women who had mastered their careers and were now being driven crazy by the tick of their biological clocks. Gossip Girl is about losing your virginity and gaining popularity, in a world where no one is old enough to vote or has to worry about making a living. But between adolescence and adulthood is an uncomfortable middle-ground, when women are ejected from college and into a world with neither glamour nor structure. The resulting period of flux is heartbreaking and hilarious and way too much. It’s humbling and it’s sexy and it’s ripe for laughs.”

Television has gotten a lot better in recent years, and Girls was one of the shows that brought a more warts-and-all portrayal of women in the 2010s to the forefront. It shares that space with shows like Broad City, The Mindy Project, Insecure, and Chewing Gum, among many others. After widespread criticism for Girls’ overarching whiteness and fetishisation of black male bodies, Dunham admitted to the very insular, privileged way of thinking she initially started with. The pitch continues:

“Products of the recession, these girls are overeducated and underemployed, sure that they’re too smart for their positions as assistants, nannies and waitresses, but not necessarily motivated enough to prove it (or even do their jobs well enough to advance). They have that mix of know-it-all entitlement and scathing self-deprecation that is the mark of all great Jewish comedians and many 24-year-old women with liberal arts degrees.”