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'Girls' is coming back to HBO, and Adam Driver isn't invited

Lena Dunham just greenlit a five-episode limited revival with almost the entire original cast. Almost.

'Girls' is coming back to HBO, and Adam Driver isn't invited

Ten years. That's how long it's been since Hannah Horvath walked out of that beach house and the screen went dark on one of HBO's most argued-about comedies. On Tuesday, October 13, Lena Dunham ended the wait. Variety, Deadline, and The Wrap all confirmed simultaneously: HBO has ordered a limited, five-episode revival of Girls, with nearly every core player confirmed to return.

Nearly.

HBO has greenlit the revival for a limited, five-episode run, with production beginning in 2027, a decade after the Season 6 finale. All four leads are back: Dunham as Hannah Horvath, Allison Williams as Marnie Michaels, Jemima Kirke as Jessa Johansson and Zosia Mamet as Shoshanna Shapiro, with Andrew Rannells also reprising his role as Elijah Krantz. Judd Apatow returns as executive producer, too. What the announcement did not include was any mention of Adam Driver.

That absence is not subtle. There is no sign of Driver, who played Hannah's boyfriend Adam. According to Deadline, Dunham wrote in her memoir Famesick that Driver was "verbally aggressive" during filming of the show. In the memoir, Dunham described Driver as unpredictable and emotionally volatile, including an incident in which he shouted at her during rehearsal and threw a chair at the wall next to her. Driver has not publicly responded to the revival news as of this writing. In Famesick, published in April, Dunham wrote that she and Driver haven't spoken since the show ended in 2017.

Also absent from the revival is Jenni Konner, who co-ran the show with Dunham. The two split as producing partners back in 2018. Co-showrunner and executive producer Konner's exit leaves Dunham firmly in sole creative command this time.

Dunham announced the news in a characteristically off-the-cuff way. In a social video announcing the series, Dunham asked her co-stars if they were free next summer, and all of them said they were in, with Rannells tagging along too. Kirke's response, lighting a cigarette: "As long as it's not too much of a commitment, I'm not doing a year." Classic Jessa energy, nine years later.

Dunham's own statement leaned into the birthday-as-catalyst mythology. She said the team always pledged to only return if there was a specific story they were burning to tell, and that around her fortieth birthday, the characters started talking to her in the shower. "And, as you may remember," she added, "once this fivesome starts talking it's pretty hard to get them to stop." She also, per The Blast, cited the chance to "wear yellow mesh again" as partial motivation.

Amy Gravitt, HBO's head of comedy programming, described the revival as turning the show's gaze "from the tumult of one's twenties to the milestone of turning forty." That's the real pitch here. Girls at 40 is almost a different genre than Girls at 24. Hannah teaching at Bard, Shoshanna fresh off a divorce, Marnie on marriage number three. According to Deadline, Dunham's vision places Jessa unvaccinated and living on a boat in Croatia, while Driver's Adam exists off-screen as a cult theater actor in Berlin. That last detail functions as both a neat narrative explanation and a fairly pointed sign of how Dunham plans to handle his absence on screen.

The internet, predictably, split in two the moment the announcement dropped. Fan reactions have been mixed. "Not sure I like this," wrote one Reddit user. "Girls was special because it took place during a very short span in a woman's life; her twenties. I feel like it's just going to be depressing seeing where everyone ended up, just like how all revivals are depressing... And Just Like That, I'm talking about you." Another wrote: "As a tired old millennial, I don't care to see their current tired old millennial lives." The And Just Like That comparison was everywhere on social by Tuesday night, which is fair and also the nightmare Dunham will need to outrun.

The pro-revival faction is equally loud. Writer Amanda Fortini posted on October 14 that she wants to watch the characters "give vent to their fullest 40-year-old selves, however unlikable or grotesque," and called herself an audience of one before adding, "I doubt it." She's right that she isn't alone. The series earned 19 Emmy nominations and two wins during its original run, and has received significant renewed appreciation in recent years. A whole generation that was too young to watch it in real time caught up during streaming, and they're pulling a different read off it now than critics did in 2012.

The bigger creative question is whether five episodes is enough room to do anything more than check in. The original ran for six seasons from 2012 to 2017, following the messy, honest friendships and romantic lives of four women in New York. That was 62 episodes of accumulation. A five-episode limited run is closer to a very long movie, and the show was never built for that compression. But Dunham has written and directed everything herself, so the voice will be consistent even if the canvas is smaller.

One specific thing to watch: two names from the original team are noticeably absent from HBO's press release, Adam Driver and co-showrunner Jenni Konner. Dunham wrote about negative experiences with both of them in her memoir Famesick, released in April of this year. Whether Driver surfaces in even a single episode remains an open question that HBO and his representatives have not answered. His Adam Sackler earned him three consecutive Emmy nominations. The character is, by Dunham's own account, still out there somewhere in Berlin.

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