This post discusses plot points for the series finale of Girls.
And with a smile and a faint rendition Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” Girls is done. In the series’ final episode we find Hannah in Upstate New York adjusting (rather poorly) to motherhood. Marnie is by her side, but the type-A manner in which she approaches childrearing only grates on Hannah, who maintains the same level of self-involvement we’ve seen throughout the series. But it all concludes on an intentionally vague yet hopeful moment of bonding between Hannah and her infant, Grover, a quiet ending to a much-discussed show.
Dunham’s HBO project has always liked to experiment with form. And while the penultimate half hour brought together all of the main characters for what felt like a more traditional goodbye, the finale presents Hannah in a completely new context. The A.V. Club spoke with Dunham and co-showrunner Jenni Konner, who directed “Latching,” about their farewell.
The A.V. Club: Why did you want to take the action of the show—and Hannah herself—away from New York City for the finale?
Jenni Konner: I always think there’s this thing when you live in New York, like this unspoken agreement between everyone who lives there like, “We’re sticking this out. It’s the hardest place to live, but it’s the best city in the world so we are all going to do this together.” And when people leave it’s almost like you’re kind of silently like, “What? How can you abandon our deal together?” It was a big step of maturity for Hannah. I don’t think it was quite giving up on the dream of New York but to accept a little bit that it kicked her ass, and that the way to be a better mother and a more stable force is to move out of the city and take this job. I thought it just showed growth with Hannah. And we also really wanted it to look very different from the rest of the show and feel very different.
Lena Dunham: I think we just wanted to do something that didn’t feel like anything we had done before. In a lot of ways, we’ve never treated her like a traditional sitcom character, and wanted to not give her a traditional sitcom ending. I just remember being really excited when I went into editing and found that Jenni had established this really interesting relationship with only using diegetic sound and keeping music to a minimum. When I showed up and she had shot-listed and had done this kind of Altman-y approach to the fight scenes. She was really thinking about it as its own thing, almost like she was styling a new pilot. And that was really exciting. She did everything from decorate the new house to shot-list an entirely new world.
AVC: Lena, you thought the fight between Hannah and her mom, Loreen, was Altman-y?
LD: Yeah, I thought that fight was really Altman-y.
JK: The way I shot it was we did it like a play. We rehearsed it a bunch of times, and there were four cameras in place, and you just followed the fight through. Instead of shooting that with any coverage or anything like that, we just shot it with four cameras in four places so they could really do it like a play. And Lena was so good, and Becky Ann Baker is unbelievable. She’s such a strong theater actor. It got to feel like we were doing it live.