The landmark show will air its sixth and final season in 2017.

Lena Dunham is no stranger to superlatives. It’s an 80-degree, cloudless September day at the Atlantic Terrace Motel in Montauk, New York, and the Girls creator and star—wearing a Barbie-pink long-sleeved wet suit, her penny-colored hair twirled on top of her head—is in the middle of directing the first episode of her trailblazing series’ last season, airing February 12. Peppered among her line notes are cheerleader affirmations: “Amazing, amazing! That could not have been more beautiful!” To avoid overheating, she has an ice pack from the on-set medic wedged between her breasts, and her furry Puma slides make a scuffing sound as she pivots from being behind the camera to being in front of it. “The minute my top comes down you’re distracted,” she tells guest star Riz Ahmed, fresh from The Night Of, playing a surf-camp instructor bemused by the off-kilter antics of Dunham’s character, Hannah Horvath.

In just a week her Instagram feed will extravagantly mourn the wrap of the series, but for the moment the mood is merry and familial. “Is that a shot list in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?” she calls to a crew member who produces the shot list in lieu of a reply. “Is village happy?” Dunham then calls out to the AD. Village—meaning the tented camp on the motel’s other side where show runner and executive producer Jenni Konner and the team are hooked in on monitors—offers a collective “Happy!” Moments later they move on to the next shot. “It’s OK,” the sound mixer says to a fellow crew member. “I know it’s coming to an end, but we’ll always have Montauk.”

It’s been nearly five years since viewers were first introduced to Dunham’s small-screen alter ego, Hannah, the 24-year-old would-be writer whose blithe narcissism was matched only by her crushing anxiety. She and her friends presented a no-filter snapshot of middle-class millennial malaise: There was Shoshanna, the manic naïf played by Zosia Mamet; Jemima Kirke’s Jessa, the proverbial free spirit who arrives two hours late to a dinner in her honor “wearing some fabulous blanket-y dress from a Grecian marketplace”; and Allison Williams’s Marnie, the responsible, Ann Taylor–suited barometer by which the others’ haplessness was measured, her frustrations with them often mirroring the audience’s own.

Five years ago to the week, that foursome of then-unknown actresses sat around a tufted corner banquette at Williamsburg’s Cafe Colette for their first interview about the not-yet-aired HBO show, which was drawing inevitable comparisons to Carrie Bradshaw and company. “It’s not the new Sex and the City,” Dunham said at the time. “These are characters who watched that show, and it’s probably impacted the way they conduct themselves in New York, but their reality is extremely different.” Unlike their more glamorous predecessors, whose satin Manolos emerged from town cars at the opening of Tao, these young women were taking the L train to Bushwick raves in Forever 21 chambray.