Magita Perez. The red dress. “I didn’t know people get, like, robbed anymore.”
In a show full of some pretty memorable moments, Girls outdid itself with “The Panic In Central Park,” a season-five episode that premiered 10 years ago (on March 27, 2016, to be precise). And a decade later, it remains a recognizable standout in the HBO series—and one of the “Eight Perfect Episodes Of TV,” period, at least according to The Atlantic—thanks to its costumes, creator Lena Dunham’s dialogue (written in a “fever dream“), and unique focus on Marnie (Allison Williams), who goes on a tremendous journey over the course of a very New York day and night.
“In a way, it feels a little bit like it was all a dream—just like it must have felt for Marnie,” Williams tells The A.V. Club about filming the outing. In this half hour of television, Marnie reassesses her relationship with herself, her husband Desi (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), and her ex Charlie (Christopher Abbott) after running into him in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, years after their breakup. Once a doormat, Charlie has changed—and so could Marnie. A character loved and loathed for her rigidity and shallowness, she shows viewers here that no one is free from the magic of a chance encounter, the perfect dress, and a wild NYC adventure spent with someone you didn’t know you missed.
“There’s so much about filming this episode that I feel like I will always remember, including what it felt like to suddenly be shooting a short film with this crew,” Williams says. “I was at work almost every day while I was on Girls, but ‘almost every day’ is very different from being in every scene.”
Largely a duet between Marnie and Charlie as they gallivant through the Plaza, stuff their faces at a red-sauce joint, and share a tender subway ride, “The Panic In Central Park” is a riff on the 1971 film The Panic In Needle Park (which boasts Al Pacino in his first starring role), about an addict and a restless woman who cross paths in New York. Dunham saw a way to put its story on Marnie and Charlie, with the episode revealing near its end that the latter is using heroin.
But there was a problem: By season five, Charlie had been off the series for years. “I ran into Jenni Konner, who was a showrunner, I think it was at the Bowery Hotel, and she sort of threw the idea out there,” Abbott tells The A.V. Club. “Then Lena called me not too long after, and she was like, ‘I’m gonna write something wild and fun.’ Sometimes you get sort of inspired—I think a spark kind of happens when it’s a little more impromptu rather than thinking about it too much.”
Allison Williams and Richard Shepard (Photo: Tim Ives)
“The Panic In Central Park” is distinct not only because it’s a standalone episode but also because it’s the series’ only installment to focus on Marnie. “When Lena told me she was planning a bottle episode with Marnie and Charlie, I tried not to get my hopes up because sometimes plotlines changed and things didn’t go as planned,” Williams says. “But when the episode landed in my inbox, I devoured it and felt like the luckiest actor in the world. The bottle episodes are among my favorites of Girls, so having the opportunity to do one felt really special. Plus, I hadn’t actually interacted with Chris Abbott since he left the show, so in a meta sense, it also gave me an opportunity to find closure with him in real life.”
A unique outing like this requires its own visual vocabulary. “I wanted to shoot it in a more informal style,” says the installment’s director, Richard Shepard, who also helmed Girls bottle episodes “One Man’s Trash” and “American Bitch.” “I wanted it to be handheld. I wanted the actors to have a freedom to experience the city in the way it was meant to, so [with] a lot of the stuff we shot near the Plaza Hotel, there were real people on the street, just to get the energy.” (The landmark is where Marnie cosplays as an escort, Magita Perez.)
And then there’s the episode’s defining visual: Marnie’s red dress. “She wears a red dress?” Abbott asks sincerely. “My memory is so bad. I saw the episode when it came out and then I have not seen it since. When you’re on the inside, you’re just acting—you don’t know what anything is going to become, eventually. You hope for the best, but you never know. From what I remember, the dress sort of fit what the episode was in a good way: out of place.”
It did. “Lena described it as a Bob Mackie design in the script,” Williams says of the garment. The Sultan Of Sequins is a far cry from the elegant (or, depending on the episode, deranged) streetwear Marnie normally sported. Shepard remembers, “The Girls crew was incredibly loyal, so when ‘Panic’ came about, it was very easy to walk down the hall to [costume designer] Jenn Rogien and say, ‘You gotta find the greatest dress in the world, ’cause she’s gonna be in it for the whole episode.’”
“That red dress was the subject of so much conversation and deliberation,” Williams recalls. “Jenn and her incredible wardrobe department built it from scratch—there were so many different scenarios where it had to look anywhere from very wrong to slightly wrong, and I think they absolutely nailed it.”
Allison Williams and the episode’s underwater crew (Photo: Richard Shepard)
After Charlie, the dress became Marnie’s second scene partner, transforming her while moving through morning, afternoon, and evening in New York—plus in and out of water when Marnie takes a spill in a Central Park pond. (That underwater scene was filmed in a pool in downtown Manhattan.) “Once we saw Allison in that dress, it all just started coming together,” Shepard says. “I just knew it was the type of dress that would look perfect when she walked into the Plaza Hotel but also look great on the subway and fucked up the morning after. And obviously her walking barefoot in that dress on a dirty New York street…there’s something iconic about that.”
For Williams, the dress is more than a remembrance; it’s a memento. “I texted Jenn before this interview to make sure my memory was correct, and she reminded me that duplicates were made—some dyed to look muddy and wet—because we filmed the pond scenes last but the aftermath first,” Williams says. “I got to keep one of the duplicates.”
But how was it to work with? “Well, anyone who has worked with me can attest to the fact that I run extremely cold—and when I’m cold, it’s very hard for me to focus,” Williams says. “As you can imagine, this dress presented a few challenges in that department. But it all felt worth it in the end, because it was the dress for that episode. I’m so used to the way it looks now that I almost no longer notice how perfectly out of place it looks in that subway car.”
Shepard recalls that subway scene as pivotal to the episode’s emotional heft. “I loved shooting on the subway. I love the old N, R trains with the colored seats that I hear they are getting rid of, [which is] too bad,” he says. “I knew if I could get them on the subway and she can be in that outfit and they can be tired and have had this incredible experience, and she could be snuggled in his arms, that we will be able to see the connection these two people have in a real way.”
The director adds, “If you grew up in New York City at any level, there is a time you’re on the subway and you’re going home with someone else that you kind of feel like you own the city. And that’s part of what this episode is about.” The half hour also explores change and growth, specifically with two characters who viewers thought they knew. (“‘Central Park’ is the best Marnie has been in years, and possibly ever,” Joshua Alston wrote in his recap for The A.V. Club.)
For Abbott, it offered a chance to reveal another side to Charlie. Known for his meekness in the first two seasons of the show, Charlie in this episode had a warm but more imposing presence as well as a gruffer voice.“What Lena wrote was, aside from even the accent, he was really different,” Abbott notes. “I had gained weight for some other parts, and I was sort of bigger than I usually am, so you take that and run with it. And when someone is sort of going through, I would say, a bit of an existential identity crisis, people sound different.”
And who in their twenties hasn’t had an identity crisis? “The Panic In Central Park” captures the night you think your life can change—and the harsh morning that follows reminding you you’re right where you were, if only maybe a little wiser. After spending the night at Charlie’s, Marnie has her own such realization. “When we were doing ‘One Man’s Trash,’ I was obsessed with this idea that no one saw Hannah go into Patrick Wilson’s [character’s] apartment, and no one sees her leave, so the question arises: Did it even happen?” Shepard says. “And this is also a situation where Marnie is by herself on the subway and runs into Charlie and has this whole night with him and then leaves him and no one from her normal life sees her,” he continues. “So it’s interesting to have such a life-changing experience without witnesses from your life. It’s a secret you have with yourself. Some of the most important things in our lives happen away from the people who know us, and we’re different people when we come back from it.”
Those universal themes endure, but Shepard also sees standalone episodes as a way to cut through the noise and create something lasting, especially in our “disposable world [with] four million shows to watch,” he says. “It’s hard to know why people connect to anything. But if you’ve lived in New York, it’s a city that can afford you the greatest nights of your life and some really tough times too. Girls sort of shied away from romance. There was romance and heartbreak in the show, but actual romance it shied away from a little. But this episode sort of let it rip.”
With throbbing needle drops and sweeping shots of the New York skyline, the episode was heart-forward, and, per Williams, “really one of those instances of synergy: an extraordinary script, in wonderful directorial hands, with beautiful cinematography, beautiful scoring, and a very clear sense of what it was.” For her, playing Marnie in this light meant it was “satisfying to see a character who is usually in such command of her presentation feel completely un-self-conscious and in her body. Beyond all of those reasons, though, I think what resonates is the wish fulfillment of one more day spent with someone with whom you have unfinished business. And because the episode explores both the fantasy of that and the devastating reality of it, I think it ends up feeling like a great catharsis for anyone who has ever been tempted to text their ex.”
“As I understand it, some episodes come together in the edit and find their identity there,” Williams says. “Others never do. This episode knew what it was from the moment Lena conceived of it, and everybody was rowing that Central Park boat in the same direction.”
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