HBO at the TCAs: Girls renewed for fourth season before its third season even debuts

The third season doesn’t debut until Sunday, but HBO announced at the session for the show at the Television Critics Association winter press tour that it has already renewed Girls for a fourth season, which will film in the summer and air in 2015. The show has never been the most-viewed series in the HBO firmament—though the network has dropped hints that it’s very well viewed on HBO Go, where its younger audience may be more likely to consume it at its own pace (probably while leeching off their parents’ account, perhaps)—but it’s always done very well for the network in the places it cares about most: in the media and at awards shows. The series landed on numerous magazine covers in advance of its second season, and it won two Golden Globes for its first season, as well as several Emmy nominations throughout its run. HBO didn’t announce how many episodes the fourth season order was for.

Meanwhile, the actual panel for the show was at least somewhat contentious, largely because executive producer Judd Apatow seemed ready to fight about nearly anything that was brought up. On the other hand, the whole session opened with a journalist asking creator and star Lena Dunham why her character appears naked so often in the show, when there’s no story reason for it like on Game Of Thrones, so you can imagine how things proceeded from there. (For what it’s worth, there was a kernel of something worth asking in the question, but it got distracted by a bunch of other stuff that didn’t matter, thus setting Apatow and fellow EP Jenni Konner off. And Dunham’s answer—that people are frequently just naked when they’re in intimate settings with those they love—more or less made sense until Apatow made it into A Thing. But, hey, it’s been a long day, and sometimes, we need these opportunities to wake up. For those who want to read more, here’s Dan Fienberg’s live-blog take on the panel at Hitfix.)