The first episode of the new season of Girls premieres Sunday.
Early on during the sixth and final season of Girls, creator/star Lena Dunham wanders along a beach, as George Harrison's My Sweet Lord swells on the soundtrack. The irony of that song, with its searching premonition of transcendence, is that Harrison was later sued and found to have "subconsciously plagiarized" the Chiffons hit He's So Fine.
You can't ever shut out worldly things entirely, but the new episodes of Girls demonstrate how it's become a more assured show – just not one that lives up to all the initial hype.
At a recent media event in New York, Judd Apatow, one of the show's executive producers, said: "I was thinking about in a few years, when people who've never seen this show get to watch it without all of the hoopla around each episode … It'll be great when people who are just getting a little older binge it and appreciate it for what it is."
If 2012 now feels like a century ago in world-historical terms, it was also several hundred TV shows ago. Back then, it was extraordinary for someone Dunham's age (26 at the time) to run their own HBO series, and Girls received the title of generational touchstone – an impossible claim to fulfill, but one that looks especially glaring when your whole cast is upper-middle-class white kids.
With television production constantly growing to feed the demand of streaming services, it's no longer so novel for creators as young as Dunham to be producing their shows: think of Issa Rae's Insecure, Donald Glover's Atlanta, Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson's Broad City, or Michaela Coel's Chewing Gum.
These days, if Twitter is groaning about something Dunham did, it probably happened on a podcast. Girls quietly turned into a comedy about obnoxious people indulging their worst impulses, nearly sitcom-like at times, both more conventional and more tightly written. It's been polished to a miniature.
The first episode of the new season, which premieres Sunday, sends Dunham's Hannah Horvath to write about a surf camp for rich hippies, where she strenuously avoids doing any work. She still manages to get involved with a water-ski instructor there, and Riz Ahmed (The Night Of) plays him as a man of supernatural chill shaded by ennui: "I love drinking," he says at one point. "But it's cool because I can drink a lot without being an alcoholic."
In the earlier seasons of Girls, the show would often swerve from appalling behaviour toward some emotional beat, wanting your sympathy as much as the self-dramatizing characters did, and finding bathos. For once, after Hannah realizes this affair will be fleeting, she doesn't have a neurotic meltdown. She yields to the moment (and a surfer bro's bad cover of She's So High). As the camera zooms in on Dunham's face, she glances around ambivalently, never quite meeting its gaze.
You can trace the evolution of Girls through Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet), caricatured by the series at first – a squirrel hooked on Adderall – and now much more complicated, someone made awkward by their earnestness. (Mamet's extreme timing deserves a lot of the credit; at that press junket last week, she joked about how hard it was to dub over all the frantic Shoshanna dialogue.)
Andrew Rannells's Elijah has also moved closer to the centre of events, despite his general disinterest in everybody else. The increasingly contrived reasons for various characters to bounce off each other suggest they may only remain friends out of habit.
During one scene from the final season, youngish curmudgeon Ray arrives home to find Shoshanna's cousin Jessa and Hannah's ex Adam eating yogurt naked on the couch – they've already hooked up in a pact of mutually assured destruction. His body wilts. It's the kind of comic shorthand that develops over years, and Girls seems content with that.
That's not to say the show has given up on more ambitious storytelling. In another episode, Hannah gets summoned to a famous novelist's apartment after writing about the young women accusing him of sexual assault. The author's demeanour keep shifting from defensive to ingratiating, and Matthew Rhys (The Americans) is a good-enough actor to exploit that ambiguity through posture alone. Ornate compositions isolate Hannah at their heart, as if Wes Anderson were shooting a horror movie.
But when a journalist asked Dunham herself if she wished for another season to address our political era, she demurred: "The fact is, the girls on the show, it's four white middle-class girls, so many of the issues that are being brought up by Trump's administration ultimately won't affect those women … The people who are affected are immigrants, women of colour, women living below the poverty line. The defunding of Planned Parenthood, or a Muslim ban, or the rollback of the Affordable Care Act, those are the women who are going to be affected."
She didn't seem to regret that Girls now belongs to the past.