HBO is bringing back Girls for a limited run of five episodes, ten years after the comedy ended with its sixth season, and Lena Dunham is returning with the show’s original four leads. Production is set to begin in summer 2027.
Dunham will once again play Hannah, with Allison Williams back as Marnie, Zosia Mamet as Shoshanna and Jemima Kirke as Jessa. Andrew Rannells is also returning as Elijah. There is no word yet on whether Adam Driver, Christopher Abbott or Alex Karpovsky will appear. Judd Apatow is back as an executive producer, but Jenni Konner, who was an executive producer and co-showrunner on the original series, is not part of the revival.
The news arrived on Tuesday in a statement and a social media video in which Dunham asked her co-stars whether they were free next summer. All of them said yes, and Rannells confirmed he was in too. Dunham joked about whether the show could still be called Girls given the cast’s ages, and Kirke, lighting a cigarette, said she was happy to take part “as long as it’s not too much of a commitment”.
In her statement, Dunham said the cast would only come back if there was a specific story that needed telling. She admitted she had missed the characters but struggled to imagine them in the present day, until they began to speak to her again around her 40th birthday. She described the chance to revisit the show that changed her life as rare, and thanked HBO and the fans. Amy Gravitt, head of comedy programming at HBO and HBO Max, said the new episodes would follow the characters from their twenties into their forties, adding that the world has changed a great deal since the series last aired.
Girls ran for six seasons on HBO from 2012 to 2017, earning 19 Emmy nominations and two wins, one of them for outstanding casting for a comedy series. The return comes without Konner, with whom Dunham has not spoken since their working relationship ended. Dunham wrote about that split in her memoir Fame Sick, which was published earlier this summer. HBO has not yet set a premiere date for the new episodes. Abbott, one of the actors whose return is unconfirmed, has previously told TheWrap that he wanted to quit acting during the show’s second season.
