We have been psyching ourselves up for some time about the final ever episode of Girls, wondering how Lena Dunham would choose to go out with this show given that she was so adamant she wouldn't keep going with the series past its sell by date and wanted to leave things at a natural end.
So we weren't expecting Adam to rock up a la Mr Big last night swearing eternal love to Hannah, because, well we got that already and we all know it just wasn't going to work with those two. We knew the four girls weren't going to cheers over some cocktails to being fabulous because we're over all that now. Girls has always been the gritty down to earth version of life that happily showed us the worst of people and made us love them anyway. So we knew Lena Dunham was never going to tie things up into a perfect little bow for us, but considering how groundbreaking this show has been, and how influential is has been to television, we wanted it to go out with a bang, and instead it went out with a whimper - literally.
We get the lesson we were supposed to learn when Lena had it out with that youngster for being so selfish - Hannah had matured - however slightly - and understood what it was like to be a mother. We liked that ultimately it came down to Marnie and Hannah's friendship because theirs was the one that kicked the whole show off, although it would have been so much funnier to see Elijah trying to raise Grover with Hannah.
Yes, it wasn't a traditional finale so in that way it made a point in itself, but it was just... dull. Tackling the stress mothers are under to breastfeed is important, but it would have been a point better made in a mid-season episode.
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Showrunners Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner have explained their reasoning for doing it this way in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, with Konner saying they wanted the final episode to be "the spinoff that will never be". It was actually executive producer Judd Apatow's suggestion that the penultimate episode would be more like a finale with all four girls meeting up, however it proved tricky for even Dunham and Konner to get past the writers, who just wanted the show to end on that ninth episode.
We can't help but agree, although the point they made was fair - more often than not we don't get the conclusions we want in life. We don't all have some breakthrough moment when we suddenly know what and who we want. We trundle through doing the best we can and sometimes life is bloody great and sometimes it's just not.
But dammit, this is TV. We wanted New York. We wanted the four girls. We wanted... we wanted just a tiny bit of a bow.
