Television series

Girls

Name: Girls
Genre: Drama, Romance
Released: 2012
Cast: Lena Dunham, Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke, Zosia Mamet, Adam Driver

Girls is a comedy about self-absorption dressed up as a coming-of-age story — four women in Brooklyn behaving badly, saying the wrong thing, mistaking bad decisions for personality. It's cringe-heavy, sexually frank, and deliberately unflattering to its heroine. Watch it for writing sharper than its characters deserve, and for a snapshot of mid-2010s millennial narcissism that already feels like a period piece.

TVMaze rating

6.5

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Fleabag2016

Same diet of catastrophic self-sabotage and jokes told a half-second before the pain lands, but tighter and meaner — Waller-Bridge takes Hannah's confessional instinct and turns it into a fourth-wall-breaking weapon.

But The bleakness under the jokes is heavier here; it earns its tears in a way Girls mostly avoided.

Broad City2014

If you want the friendship without the toxicity, Abbi and Ilana are just as broke and directionless but they actually like each other, which makes the comedy warmer and, somehow, just as filthy.

But It's sillier and more surreal; the emotional stakes rarely go as deep as Girls does.

Insecure2016

Issa Rae runs the same playbook — cringe, romantic chaos, friendships fraying under money and ambition — through a Black LA lens Girls' all-white Brooklyn never approached, with a soundtrack to match.

But It's a slower burn emotionally and leans more into romance-drama than pure cringe comedy.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

An Unmarried Woman1978

Same DNA: an unflattering, funny-sad portrait of a woman's messy self-reinvention, told with the same refusal to make her likeable on cue. Girls didn't invent this; it inherited it.

Jill Clayburgh's Erica gets dumped, falls apart, and rebuilds her identity from scratch in a film that invented the tragicomic 'woman figuring her life out badly' genre decades before Girls got credit for it.

But It's a slower, more earnest 70s drama — you won't get the joke-a-minute rhythm Girls trains you to expect.

Frances Ha2013

Greta Gerwig's directionless dancer, adrift in gentrifying New York and terrible at admitting it, is basically Hannah Horvath's gentler older cousin — same broke-and-flailing energy, filmed in glorious black and white.

But It's a single 86-minute film, not a binge — you'll want more of these people and won't get it.

Sex and the City1998

The obvious ancestor: four women, New York, sex written with unusual candour for its time. Watching it after Girls shows you exactly what the daughters were rebelling against, and echoing.

But The glamour and shopping-as-therapy stuff hasn't aged well, and its politics feel dated next to Girls' rawer take.

PEN152019

Rewind the humiliation clock ten years earlier, thirteen instead of twenty-three, and you get the same unsparing eye for social disaster, just with more acne and worse haircuts.

But The two leads play themselves as teenagers among actual teen actors, a device that's either hilarious or too weird to sit with.

Please Like Me2013

An Australian sibling to Girls — low-key, autobiographical, wandering between very funny and very sad without warning — following twenty-somethings whose lives refuse to organize into a plot.

But It's gentler and sadder than funny; if you came for jokes-per-minute, this isn't that show.

Search Party2016

Starts as the same aimless-millennial hangout comedy, then swerves hard into thriller territory — a great pick if Girls' navel-gazing ever made you wish something, anything, would actually happen.

But The tonal whiplash from mumblecore to genre plot is jarring if you wanted more of the character-study register.

Younger2015

Same publishing-adjacent New York world and generational anxiety, but shinier, more plotted, and easier to marathon — good comfort viewing once you want your millennial mess with less despair.

But It's much softer and more conventionally romantic; the satire has way less bite than Girls'.

BoJack Horseman2014

Both shows run on the same engine: characters who understand exactly what's wrong with them and choose to do it anyway. BoJack proves that idea survives a talking-animal cartoon just fine.

An animated sitcom about a washed-up horse-actor becomes one of TV's most devastating studies of self-sabotage — the same instinct Girls has for making you love people who keep hurting everyone around them, cartoon edition.

But It's six seasons long and gets genuinely, sometimes unbearably dark — a very different commitment than Girls' tighter run.

Fish Tank2009

Strip out the Brooklyn irony and the punchlines and you get this: the same fascination with a young woman's bad decisions and social humiliations, treated as tragedy instead of comedy. It's the register Girls flirts with but rarely commits to.

Andrea Arnold's kitchen-sink drama follows a teenage girl on an Essex estate with the same raw, unglamorous eye for humiliation Girls has, minus every joke to soften the blow — this is the premise played dead straight.

But There is no comic relief here at all; it's a genuinely tough, tense watch with none of Girls' cushioning wit.