A lot of people love Girls and cannot wait for the HBO comedy-drama-cringefestival to return for its third season. A lot of people loathe Girls and resent the fact that its portrayal of wayward twentysomethings as devised by 27-year-old Lena Dunham has been branded the voice of a generation. Some people don’t know what Girls is.
All groups—love, hate, clueless—can, however, find things to be delighted by in the first trailer for the show’s new season. Girls exists in a strange pop-culture space, where incessant buzz meets incessant backlash, creating a discord that breeds that incessant conversation about the show and what it means to like, despise, appreciate, criticize, or, the big one, relate to it.
The new 90-second trailer hints at nothing that will settle any debate over the show. It is, on the other hand, a sizzle reel of quotable dialogue. Really quippy, relevant, observant, and, daresay, relatable dialogue.
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The trailer introduces four girls in crisis, a state of being we’ve become used to with Dunham’s Hannah Horvath, Allison William’s Marnie Michaels, Jemima Kirke’s Jessa Johannson, and Zosia Mamet’s Shoshanna Shapiro. The existential fretting is fitting considering where each character left off at the end of season two. After excising him from her life completely, Hannah is rescued from rock bottom of an emotional meltdown by Adam (Adam Driver). Marnie makes the ill-advised decision to reunite with Charlie (Christopher Abbott). Shoshanna dumps Ray (Alex Karpovsky). Jessa skips town.
More importantly, Hannah gets a hideous haircut.
The quartet seems to be dealing with their respective emotional turmoil with enviable zippy wit. For all the hand-wringing over whether Girls accurately portrays the insufferable madness of a twentysomething in transition, nearly every line and moment in the trailer, in the very least, elicits a “Girl, I get you” reaction. In fact, watching the trailer will cause a 90-second long “Oof, I’ve been there” wince. None more so than every clear shot of Hannah’s haircut.
Without further ado, the most relatable lines from the Girls season three trailer.
“It’s really liberating to say ‘no’ to shit you hate,” Hannah when Adam takes her into nature. (The worst.)
“Can you believe that my friend told me she died because she didn’t want to hang out with me?” Jessa, apparently unaware that we’ve all contemplated such fibbing.
“I am OK. I may not seem OK and I may not be OK now but I’m, like, OK.” Marnie, reciting the inner monologue of every twentysomething-in-crisis who is most definitely not OK.
“My life is a mess. And I know that was a personal choice, but maybe it’s time for me to un-choose that choice.” Shoshanna, fully acknowledging that we are all conscious of the bad decisions we are making, thank you very much.
Adam: “I don’t hate your friends. I’m just not interested in anything they have to say.”Hannah: “I’m not interested in anything they have to say! That’s the point of friendship.” I’ve had the same best friends for 15 years. I haven’t cared what they had to say in about 14 and a half.
“It’s amazing that I hold the keys to the prison that is my mind,” Hannah summing up the horror-movie plot that is life.
