Lena Dunham’s ‘Girls’ is making a comeback — but 1 key character is missing from the announcement

Girls fans, unite. The popular TV series is coming back. HBO announced Tuesday that the show, created by and starring Lena Dunham, will be returning for five episodes, with Dunham, Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke and Zosia Mamet reprising their roles as aspiring writer Hannah Horvath and her friends. 

Andrew Rannells, who played Elijah, will also be included in the limited revival, and Judd Apatow will return as executive producer. 

The comedy-drama, which aired from 2012 to 2017, gave a raw, unfiltered (and largely unglamorous) look at life as a 20-something in New York City. Body confidence, bad boyfriends and poor choices were key themes. The show received 29 Emmy Award nominations and won two, and was recently ranked the 13th-best TV show of the 21st century by the New York Times. 

HBO announced the show’s return in a staged mock video call, with Dunham asking her costars if they wanted to take part. Williams joined the call first and wasted no time in telling Dunham that she had been waiting 15 — no, 16 — minutes for others, exactly like Marnie would. Kirke, Mamet and Rannells then joined, all acting as their famous characters. 

In a statement, Dunham said the cast always said they would only return to Girlsif there was a “specific story we were burning to tell.” She added that while she missed the characters, she had struggled to “picture them in the present day” for a long time. “Then, right around my fortieth birthday, they started talking to me in the shower,” she said. “And, as you may remember, once this fivesome starts talking it’s pretty hard to get them to stop.”

When asked about the possibility of a Girls comeback in a July 2025 interview with Variety, Dunham joked that Shoshanna runs a sustainable athleisure startup and Marnie might be on her third marriage. Filming will start in 2027, a decade after the final episode aired, but there’s been no premiere date provided yet and no plot details have been released. On her Substack account, Good Thing Going, Dunham acknowledged that the group “are not, strictly speaking, girls anymore.” She wrote that she couldn’t stop thinking about where the characters would be and how they’d meet this milestone. 

There was one noticeable absence in the announcement. Adam Driver, who starred as Hannah’s love interest in the series, Adam Sackler, throughout the show’s six seasons, wasn’t included in the call. Whether or not other original cast members, including Christopher Abbott, will return is also unclear. 

Driver and Dunham’s complicated working relationship was covered in Famesick, Dunham’s memoir published in April, which detailed several difficult experiences while working with Driver on Girls. 

Dunham wrote that Driver was “short-tempered and verbally aggressive, condescending and physically imposing.” She referenced a specific incident, in which he “hurled a chair at the wall” next to her. “Late one night, as we practiced lines in my trailer, I found that mine were suddenly gone. I knew I’d written them,” wrote Dunham. “I’d known them only minutes before. But when I opened my mouth, all that came out was a stammer — until finally, Adam screamed, ‘F***ING SAY SOMETHING’ and hurled a chair at the wall next to me. ‘WAKE THE F*** UP,’ he told me. ‘I’M SICK OF WATCHING YOU JUST STARE.'”

Variety reported that Driver responded to the allegations in May, at a Cannes Film Festival press conference for Paper Tiger, saying, “I have no comment on any of that. I’m saving it all for my book.” 

Dunham’s coshowrunner, Jenni Konner, was also missing from the announcement. The pair announced in 2018 that they were splitting as producing partners and Dunham wrote about the breakdown of her friendship and working relationship with Konner in Famesick.