Dancing On My Own: Examining Character Development in HBO’s Girls

In recent years, the HBO series Girls has experienced a resurgence in viewership and public discourse. Situated within the landscape of postfeminist television, there have been many conversations about how the show represents the privileged, self-involved, and unmotivated behaviors of many millennials. However, there was a lack of research focused on the growth of the lead characters from the series’ beginning to its end. I conducted a textual analysis of Girls, examining the four main characters’ development in career, romance, and female friendship. I examined their goals, emotions, and actions in these categories throughout seven episodes across three seasons in the series. In the end, Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, and Shoshanna are beginning to mature from their prolonged adolescence into true adulthood. The women’s career paths are nonlinear and their stubbornness to pursue creativity shifts to acceptance by the end of the series. They have a tendency to self-sabotage in their romantic and platonic relationships, but come to accept and give different types of love. By the end of the show, each woman ends up on a path separate from one another. The selfishness that defines them in the beginning of the series is leveraged by each woman to help her make the best decisions for her future. Girls echoes the signature individualism of postfeminist media texts, while straying away from the idealized femininity which earlier postfeminist television depicts.