Read Lena Dunham’s original pitch for Girls as a “tone poem about millennial life”
In celebration of Girls’ final season, The Hollywood Reporter did an oral history of the show. In it, they printed the entirety of Lena Dunham’s original pitch to HBO, which Dunham calls both a “tone poem about millennial life” and “the worst pitch you’ve ever read.” In all fairness, who hasn’t written something embarrassing when he or she was 23? Most of us just have those pieces saved on our laptops and pray no one will ever find them. Still, Dunham’s manifesto basically encapsulates everything people hate about her generation. It’s passionate, but reeking with privilege; self-important, but completely lacking in self-awareness. Maybe it seemed insightful at the beginning of this decade, but it doesn’t really now. For example, she concludes:
They are the Facebook generation and ironically enough they are isolated by all the connectivity available to them (and prone to Facebook stalking and drunk-IMing and booty calls via Twitter and deciphering text messages like they’re ancient hieroglyphs and blogging pictures of all the food they eat).
They are navigating the transition out of college-level codependence on their girlfriends, but will still call to announce that they got their period or saw a man masturbating on the subway or saw a man who looks sort of like a kid they went to camp with (could it be him? And if so, is he on Facebook?)
They’re beautiful and maddening. They’re self-aware and self obsessed. They’re your girlfriends and daughters and sisters and employees. They’re my friends and I’ve never seen them on TV.
Even though Dunham turned in an essay that doesn’t make any mention of a structure for a series—which one could argue points to one of Girls’ greatest flaws—HBO believed in her enough because of Tiny Furniture to get on board. You can read the rest of the pitch over at THR along with a bevy of anecdotes from the cast. There’s even a recipe for how to make fake cum. (Okay: “Conditioner and Cetaphil,” per Dunham.)