Shortly after the election, for no particular reason, I lifted a small set of arbitrary restrictions that I had previously imposed on my life. I started putting half-and-half in my coffee instead of drinking it black. I started using emoji instead of forcing myself to communicate in words. And instead of continuing to avoid a cultural phenomenon that I had been told spoke endless volumes about the world, the flesh, and my approximate demographic, I started watching the television show “Girls.”

Within a couple of months, I’d caught up on the series. The binge was lovely and absorbing, and I felt glad that I’d waited: “Girls” was a different, better, funnier show than its obsessive and often airless coverage had made it out to be. Over six seasons, the show deepened and matured in a way that its central quartet of young white women in Brooklyn—eager, sloppy Hannah; impossible Marnie; moody flower child Jessa; younger, impressionable Shoshanna—mostly didn’t. On Sunday, those characters will exit the series in much the same way that they began it, treating life like a prepaid, vaguely disappointing all-you-can-eat buffet.

Their entitlement, so irritating to viewers, afforded “Girls,” in its best moments, a thrilling narrative freedom. In the occasional self-contained episodes, conceived and produced like short movies, the characters pursued surreal, magical, tenderly degraded private adventures—Shoshanna in a nurse costume in Japan; Hannah in a beautiful town house, transforming under the influence of a stranger’s devotion; Marnie unlocking the handcuffs of her own personality and melting into New York City for an endless day and night. From time to time, the show could produce details that felt truer than memory: the characters’ physical carelessness with one another; Hannah’s egotistical, generous, sophisticated-child manner of speaking; the way the characters behaved when they were genuinely happy, a rare emotion that required them to be either dancing or alone.

Watching the series all at once, I kept thinking that its greatest artistic success was responsible for its major critical handicap: the show was so well-written, so carefully directed, and so attuned to a narrow type of rarely-seen-before verisimilitude that some portion of its audience simply lost the ability to distinguish it from real life. Even before the first episode aired, critics were writing about the show as if it were, as Willa Paskin observed, teasingly, in April, 2012, “a sort of factual report about female sexuality dispatched from the front lines of gentrified Brooklyn.” And writers continue to treat the show as though realism were its goal. This season, Hannah accepted a teaching gig at an unnamed college in upstate New York, and, this week, Vulture ran a post with the headline “Hannah on Girls_ _Could Not Have Gotten That Job.” A story line about Hannah becoming pregnant has brought this interpretive tendency into even sharper relief: she seems to be the only person, both within the show and outside it, who thinks that it’s realistic for Hannah Horvath to keep a pregnancy or have a child. (The show has made typically good and slippery use of the dramatic irony produced by that gap between Hannah’s perspective and everyone else’s.)

“Girls” provided a lens through which many rude, sexy, and inessential questions could be asked on TV. The overly accessible pastime of “Girls” criticism frequently just asked those same questions again. Was Lena-as-Hannah attractive? How loathsome were_ _the characters, exactly? Is the world of rich white girls fundamentally racist? Can important life lessons be drawn from comically humiliating sex? These questions are native to the show, and art provides open-ended answers. But as they were rendered in criticism I generally found these questions dispiriting—as if they were being offered, over and over, to conceal the larger, inadmissible, ridiculous question of whether Lena Dunham herself was worthy or unworthy, good or bad. After watching the series, I understand even less why so many people received “Girls” through a lens of unyielding literalism—as if the show were the world, and we needed to defend and critique it, when, in fact, as my colleague Emily Nussbaum wrote for New York in 2012, the show was already both a defense and critique of a particular world.

During my two-month “Girls” binge, and since then—watching the show’s terrific, unstable, weightless final season—I have not felt the desire to take the series personally. This has been true even when an episode runs on emotions I find familiar, as when Hannah went on a reporting trip in the season opener and her timid crankiness suddenly gave way to bliss—or in the tricky bottle episode “American Bitch,” which burrowed into a power dynamic between older male writers and their young female counterparts that I’ve experienced and written about at length. There it was: the show’s much catalogued relatability. And yet the part of that episode that felt most intimate to me was the preteen playing Rihanna on her flute at the end.

The fact that I can watch “Girls” like this, five years on, seems like evidence of how well, and how specifically, the show has constructed its particular universe—as well as how quickly the show has entrenched its most radical aspects as normal. I don’t need to feel either disturbed by or painfully grateful for seeing women my age rendered in full-blooming imperfection. In large part because of the artistic authority with which Dunham approached “Girls,” I can take that for granted as part of the scene.

I also don’t think “Girls” demands identification as much as satirizes it. The main characters are never more ridiculous than when they are explaining the way they see themselves—in one of Marnie’s funniest moments, at her infelicitous wedding, she described her aesthetic as “Ralph Lauren meets Joni Mitchell,” with a “nod to my cultural heritage, which is white Christian woman.” The fruitlessness of endlessly fine-tuning your self-image—of frantically trying to echolocate your personhood against someone else’s story, real or fictional—is baked into every episode of the show. This is particularly clear in the scant number of episodes, just a dozen or so over six seasons, in which Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, and Shoshanna have appeared as an ensemble. In these episodes, the characters’ interdependent narcissism generally becomes unwieldy: the four of them go to the North Fork with competing ideas of a good weekend, and their trivial preferences become statements of purpose—ammunition for a fight about who they are.

Throughout the series, the four of them have fought in beach houses and in bathrooms, unable to let go of their obsessions with appearance and hierarchy, unable to understand why they aren’t actually friends. The answer is that, as a rule, they don’t know how to see other people as individuals, rather than as appendages of their own self-images. Even when Shoshanna, in the penultimate episode, tells the other three that she’s tired of their exhausting, narcissistic interplay—“I think we should all just agree to call it,” she says—she’s merely trading them in for people who might reflect on her better, girls with “jobs and purses and nice personalities.” But nothing is a direct reflection, other than a mirror: not a friend, not a story, not an auteur, and definitely not a television show.