Lena Dunham’s next TV project will be a world away from the hipster neighbourhoods of Girls, as the writer and director plans to remake Julia Davis’s British sitcom Camping.

Dunham announced the news on Thursday and revealed that Jennifer Garner will star in the show, which will be made for HBO in the US.

Garner will play Kathryn Siddell-Bauers, who Dunham and her production partner Jenni Konner describe as “messy, tough and provocative and really, really fun”. The show is expected to be a faithful remake of Davis’s original, focusing on a disastrous family camping trip.

The Guardian described the original series, which aired in 2016 on Sky in the UK, as “craftily observed, beautifully performed, as well as typically, gloriously, boldly bleak”.

Jennifer Garner Photograph: Allstar/Disney

Camping will be Dunham’s first big project since Girls, which finished last year after six seasons. The runaway success of the show – an abrasively funny portrayal of a group of brattish, “overeducated and underemployed” millennials living in New York – saw Dunham dubbed the “voice of a generation”.

“We’ve always said we would never push aside the idea of doing a [Girls] sequel, or a movie,” Dunham said last year. “But returning to these characters would be an amazing thing. Once the appropriate length of time had passed, we would be all in.”

Camping will be Garner’s first lead TV role since she starred in the spy thriller Alias, which was created by Star Trek director JJ Abrams and finished in 2006.