Hannah Horvath

Hannah is a would-be writer in her mid-twenties, freshly cut off financially by her parents and unmoored in Brooklyn. She's working on a memoir she's convinced will define her generation, drifting through an unpaid internship and a fumbling almost-relationship with Adam, certain of her own talent even when nothing around her confirms it.

Dunham, who also created and wrote the show, refuses to flatter Hannah into likability — she's self-absorbed, embarrassing, often wrong, and the show lets her be all of that without apology. The comedy comes from how precisely observed her delusions are, and how rarely the show lets her off the hook for having them.