HBO has greenlit a five-episode revival of Lena Dunham’s acclaimed comedy-drama Girls, bringing back the original core cast for a limited run with production scheduled to begin in 2027.
Creator, showrunner, and star Lena Dunham announced the revival alongside her original castmates in a promotional video shared by the network on October 13, 2026, ten years after its series finale aired on HBO. The series originally premiered in April 2012, running for six seasons and 62 episodes before concluding in April 2017, and earned a spot as number 30 on the BBC list of 100 Greatest TV Shows of the 21st Century.
Original Cast Members Return For Five Episodes
Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke, and Zosia Mamet will all reprise their respective roles as Marnie Michaels, Jessa Johansson, and Shoshanna Shapiro, alongside Dunham as Hannah Horvath, reuniting the core quartet of friends who navigated their messy twenties in New York City across the show’s initial six-season run from 2012 to 2017. The original run notably filmed early scenes at Silvercup Studios, sharing a complex with Sex and the City, and the program won the Golden Globe for best comedy series in 2013 alongside a best actress win for Dunham.
Andrew Rannells is also slated to return as Elijah Krantz, appearing in the announcement video alongside the main cast. Judd Apatow, who served as executive producer on the original series, will return in his executive producer role for the revival alongside Ilene S. Landress and Michael P. Cohen of Good Thing Going, while Williams, Kirke, Mamet, and Rannells join as co-executive producers. Meanwhile, former co-showrunner Jenni Konner is not involved in the project, following the 2018 split of her and Dunham’s producing partnership.
Adam Driver, who played Hannah’s volatile on-and-off-again love interest, Adam Sackler, is notably absent from the network’s casting announcement. In her 2026 memoir, Famesick, Dunham detailed creative and personal friction with Driver during the show’s original production, alleging that he could be short-tempered, verbally aggressive, condescending, and physically imposing, and claiming he once threw a chair at the wall beside her when she forgot her lines. Driver has not publicly commented on the allegations, and HBO’s official statement did not mention his involvement; however, at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Driver offered a brief retort to reporters: I have no comment on any of that. I’m saving it all for my book.
Lena Dunham Explains Why She Brought Back Girls
Speaking to Variety, Dunham explained that the inspiration for the new episodes struck around a significant personal milestone, after she previously maintained that any comeback required a compelling narrative reason rather than simple nostalgia.
“If we had something to say that was really specific, and it was a moment in their lives where we felt like revisiting it – like millennial women becoming mothers or stepping into menopause or going to live at old-age homes – I would always want to work with those people again,”
Lena Dunham, Creator and Star, via Variety
Dunham added that the characters came back to her unexpectedly. I’ve missed these characters, but for a long time I couldn’t quite picture them in the present day. Then, right around my 40th birthday, they started talking to me in the shower. And, as you may remember, once this fivesome starts talking it’s pretty hard to get them to stop,
she stated in the network’s press release, while also adding the joke, Can we still call it Girls? Because we’re old as f—.
HBO Executives Discuss Ten-Year Time Jump
Amy Gravitt, executive vice-president and head of HBO and HBO Max comedy programming, welcomed the shift in perspective as the revival will pick up a decade after the events of the season six finale, placing the characters firmly in their mature years.
“To say the world has changed since we last saw Hannah, Marnie, Shoshanna, Jessa, and Elijah is a massive understatement, but we know fans – old and new – will be happy to see how they’ve grown and relieved to see that they’re still the ‘Girls’ we knew way back when.”
Amy Gravitt, Executive Vice-President of HBO Programming, via BBC
Production on the limited run is scheduled to begin in 2027, with story details and additional casting remaining under wraps.