We were all just doing our best. Hannah

Our best was awful. Jessa

**

Girls is the Hillary Clinton of TV shows: You cant admit you like it without acknowledging that its not perfect. So lets get that out of the way, and acknowledge that Girls was far from perfect, from its hamfisted approach to race , to its over-emphasis on millennial laziness .

And yet.

Ive grown up with the Girls. When the show first premiered, my colleagues and I recapped each episode by G-chat , and during our season 1, episode 3 recap I wrote: I am literally the target demographic.

Fans of Girls dont tend to identify with one specific character on the show Im a Hannah or a Marnie never entered our lexicon the way Im a Carrie or a Charlotte did in the 90s. And thats because the girls/women of Girls have never been glamorous archetypes to aspire to. The show didnt make a generation of young women dream of being columnists who run around in ridiculously expensive shoes and have fabulous (or at the very least, entertaining) sex in New York City.

Girls is less aspirational, full of unsettlingly realistic bad sex, friendships that ebb and flow and sometimes end, career opportunities that pop up and then result in failure. Its like a fun house mirror that reflects back a distorted, somewhat terrifying version of what life as a white, financially comfortable, Brooklyn 20-something might look like, and the shows unlikable protagonists often reflected its target audiences worst impulses and most selfish thoughts.

The actresses who play the Girls are about my age Lena Dunham (Hannah) and Jemima Kirke (Jessa) are slightly older, and Zosia Mamet (Shosh) and Allison Williams (Marnie) are slightly younger. Although they are supposed to be a few years younger than their real-life ages and my own on the show, these womens journeys from fresh-faced NYC newcomers to more actualized human beings seemed to mirror my own. (The four actresses who play the Girls also underwent their own real-life transformations as the show progressed, from virtual unknowns to bonafide celebrities.)