‘Girls’ Best Episodes, Ranked

By Season 5, the girls have moved from their early 20s to the solid middle. With the passage of time comes new milestones, and Marnie’s ill-advised union with philandering musician Desi (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) brings “Girls” into the world of wedding culture. Marnie is, of course, born to be a bridezilla, a prima donna instinct only aggravated by rain, an overbearing Rita Wilson as her mother and a terrible makeup artist, played by the great Bridget Everett. No wonder Hannah has to sneak away and have car sex with her new boyfriend (Jake Lacy) to blow off some steam. Little does she know, Adam (Adam Driver) and Jessa are off starting their own affair, a pairing with seismic consequences down the road. But the world-historical awfulness of the Marnie-Desi marriage is enough to make a comic set-piece on its own. This is his eighth engagement! Even torch-carrying Ray (Alex Karpovsky) can finally admit they deserve each other.

Hanah’s maternal grandmother, Flo (a delightful June Squibb), appears to be dying. Flo’s decline summons Hannah; her mother, Loreen; and Loreen’s sisters Sissy (Amy Morton) and Margot (Deirdre Lovejoy) to upstate New York, where “Girls” paints a complete family portrait in just half an hour. We quickly pick up on Sissy’s resentment as the childless caretaker and see how Hannah and her cousin Rebecca (Sarah Steele), a workaholic med student, are destined to resent, rather than relate to, one another. “Flo” distills how young adults start to understand their parents as people with baggage and childhood scars of their own — which only adds weight to Loreen’s advice about Hannah’s floundering relationship with Adam: “I don’t want you to spend your life socializing him like he’s a stray dog,” she warns. “It’s not easy being married to an odd man.” That “Flo” has shown Loreen’s own life to be far from perfect ironically helps her point. She’s lived enough life, some of which we’ve just seen the fruits of, to know of what she speaks.

Even on a show with a well-earned reputation for cringe, “On All Fours” stands above. Hannah, in the midst of a downward spiral fueled by an OCD flare-up, punctures her eardrum with a Q-tip, a scene that still evokes a sympathetic shudder. Adam has odd, alienating and borderline violent sex with his new girlfriend, Natalia (Shiri Appleby), which unleashed a firestorm of online discourse at the time. Amid steep competition, Marnie manages to take the cake for most humiliating stunt when she serenades her ex-boyfriend Charlie (Christopher Abbott) with an acoustic cover of Kanye West’s “Stronger” at a party for his app. All three incidents leave lessons to be learned: Hannah’s mental illness poses a danger to her well-being; not all of Adam’s partners will accommodate his proclivities the way that Hannah did; and Marnie, to quote Charlie, has gotta get her shit together. But this wouldn’t be “Girls” if the characters were all that self-aware.

Dunham is a born-and-bred New Yorker, raised in the artistic enclaves of pre-Giuliani SoHo and private school Brooklyn. All the more remarkable, then, how completely she captures the experience of the transplant visiting the middle American hometown she’s worked so hard to distance herself from. Hannah goes back to Michigan for her parents’ anniversary party, treating the high school classmates she encounters there with a mix of naked disdain and poorly disguised envy. “You are from New York. Therefore, you are naturally interesting,” she tells herself in the mirror as part of a pre-date hyping up routine. The line verbalizes a common, unspoken belief in such plain terms it reveals the sentiment’s comic absurdity. As much as contemporary commentators assumed “Girls” was a work of straightforward autobiography, “The Return” is a sterling example of Dunham stepping outside herself to hit on a broader truth.

Hannah’s complications made “Girls” as delicious (and, at times, as controversial) as it was, but even by the show’s high standard, “Dead Inside” is unusually alert to her hypocrisies. After the death of her book editor (John Cameron Mitchell), Hannah’s singleminded focus is on the fate of her project; attempts by Adam and by his sister Caroline (Gaby Hoffmann) to evince from her even a little sympathy go unheard. The episode’s cleverest gambit comes in the final moments. Here, Hannah repurposes a made-up story Caroline had told her about Adam’s goodness, to try to get Hannah to cry and thus prove her humanity, as a story starring herself, indicating that she really does care about the world beyond herself. As a character study, it’s pitch-dark, but the tone stays aloft thanks to playful dialogue and a sense that Hannah, if narcissistic, is at least trying not to be seen as narcissistic. Perhaps that’s a first step!

When Hannah learns Adam has acquired a whole new girlfriend while she’s been in Iowa, it kicks off the closest thing “Girls” has to a true bottle episode: an installment confined to a single preexisting location, in this case Hannah’s Greenpoint apartment. Hannah barricades herself in her former bedroom — the very place Adam has been shacking up with his new flame without officially dumping his old one — and refuses to leave. Instead, everyone from Marnie to Jessa to Shoshanna to Ray comes to visit her, helping her process the end of the relationship. It’s like a shiva, but for realizing just how much you’ve grown apart from your ex. For once, Hannah’s self-indulgent wallowing is very much earned, but she’s eventually able to accept that the end of her time with Adam is for the best.

Hannah’s professional life provides some of the series’ most well-observed humor. Dunham, then a very online individual who was by Season 3 a generation-defining media phenom herself, knew about the culture industry enough to skewer it with precision. That’s exactly what’s at play in this episode, as Hannah’s new opportunity — a job at GQ — is only exhilarating for a day or two before she realizes that she’s writing branded content and that her colleagues have put their ambitions on hold in the name of material comfort. (The lovingly shot office fridge that gives the show its title comes to seem a bit sinister.) None other than Jenna Lyons — at that moment defining a certain preppy American sangfroid as the creative director of J. Crew, with “The Real Housewives of New York City” still in her future — played Hannah’s new boss. Her deadpan, glamorous presence speaks to the genius of the “Girls” approach to casting, as Lyons adds to both the aspirational quality and the chilly remove of the GQ gig.

An immersive theatrical re-creation of the 1964 killing of Kitty Genovese — a crime perpetrated in front of dozens of witnesses — gives this episode its title and impact. As Adam appears in the production, Hannah, watching, experiences the slow-rolling revelation that he has taken up with Jessa. That those around her seem blind to her horror ends up rhyming with the events of the production. Elsewhere, Elijah’s (Andrew Rannells) disappointment with his wealthy boyfriend, Dill Harcourt (Corey Stoll), provides Rannells with something juicy to play, and offers a sharply drawn look at power dynamics in relationships. Dill commanding Elijah to leave his party if he can’t accept the older man’s philandering makes for a jarring moment in what seemed like a dream relationship. It’s the kind of tonal shift at which “Girls” excelled.

That Hannah’s parents (Peter Scolari and Becky Ann Baker) played sizable roles in “Girls” is only surprising until one considers the period of life the series documents. Hannah is only just emerging from the nest and relies on her mom and dad for more than she’d like to admit. The portrait of Tad and Loreen Horvath that comes into view is a sorrowful one: These two people spent their adult lives talking past one another to get through raising their child. Now, with Hannah in New York, they’re forced to see themselves and each other more clearly. This episode features the long-foreshadowed moment when Tad comes out as gay. And his relentless self-scrutiny, as well as his wife’s sharp sense that what’s being done is a punishment, are beautifully written and performed. They also provide new angles from which to see Hannah.

Hannah’s move to the Midwest to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop reboots many of the show’s relationships. Indeed, while Hannah video-chats with an exasperated Marnie, attempts to call Shoshanna and is visited by Elijah, old dynamics have shifted. But starting over isn’t easy: “Triggering” deftly introduces a classroom full of potential new friends for Hannah, only to promptly depict them as alienated both by her work — barely concealed memoir presented as fiction — and her demanding presence. Hannah facing criticism tends to bring out an intriguing side of her character. Interrogating how resistant she can be to opportunities for growth — and looking with care rather than scorn at the kind of writer she actually is — “Triggering” stands out among the short run of Iowa episodes and gives a welcome glimpse into Hannah as writer, and how she’s perceived by her peers.

“Welcome to Bushwick” marks the first time all the major players are gathered in one place: a warehouse party on the bleeding edge of Brooklyn gentrification. Many streams that were separate cross in this episode to disastrous, yet hilarious, effect: Marnie is horrified to discover that Charlie has moved on to a new love, played by Dunham’s real-life friend Audrey Gelman. Jessa accidentally invites her older boss (James Le Gros), a cool dad who can’t hang like he used to. And Hannah realizes she doesn’t know much about Adam outside their situationship, from his friends to his past struggles with addiction. Shoshanna’s crack-smoking misadventure, which inaugurates her relationship with the misanthropic Ray when he’s assigned to babysit her, is just the cherry on top of an already chaotic evening, even if it’s the best-remembered part.

“Girls” bids goodbye to its most significant relationship by having Hannah and Adam spend a day speed-running a potential life together, play-acting the stable partnership they were never able to forge. Adam makes a sudden, radical proposal to a visibly pregnant Hannah: What if he abandoned his girlfriend, Jessa, so they could parent the baby together? Hannah almost gives herself over to the fantasy, but when Adam brings up serious practicalities like marriage, it’s all too much. Dunham and Driver are never better than when playing out their characters’ dawning, unspoken understanding that this isn’t going to happen. “What’s the rest of your night look like?” Adam asks a weeping Hannah, because they won’t be spending it — or any other — together. Unlike so many series in their final days, “Girls” resists the easy satisfaction of sending Hannah and Adam off into the sunset.

“Girls” would technically continue for another three-plus seasons after “Beach House,” but this iconic episode makes what would become the series’ closing argument: that as they get further away from college and into their actual lives, the girls — three of whom met at Oberlin — don’t have much in common anymore. They discover this over the course of a weekend on the North Fork of Long Island organized and micromanaged by Marnie, who wants to “prove to everyone via Instagram that we can still have fun as a group.” When she puts it that way, the mission is doomed even before Hannah reconnects with Elijah, who invites his friends over to the house, further aggravating Marnie’s control-freak tendencies. On top of that, Shoshanna unloads on everyone in a fantastically vicious monologue. “Beach House” is an early indication that Shosh, the youngest of the group, will also be the first to outgrow it. She knows, and deserves, better.

Jessa can be a challenging character: Affecting an attitude of being above her friends’ petty dramas, she resists being drawn into the show’s stories. Here she receives special consideration, as a trip she and Hannah take together to visit Jessa’s neglectful father (Ben Mendelsohn) forces her to confront emotions she would rather avoid. Kirke does her best acting of the series opposite Mendelsohn; her declaration that she deserves more care than he ever gave her — “I’m the child!” — resonates throughout the show. The episode takes its name from Jessa’s stepmother (Rosanna Arquette) declaring that what we perceive as the world is a simulation. Hannah is sympathetic to this perspective; she has a sexual interlude with Jessa’s teen stepbrother (Nick Lashaway), as if to prove to herself that nothing really matters. For the moment, it doesn’t, but as in other of the best “Girls” episodes, reality is beginning to intrude.

Though it disrupted the plan for the show, Christopher Abbott’s abrupt departure from “Girls” after the end of Season 2 did conclude a storyline that was threatening to run out of road. (Abbott’s Charlie, the on/off boyfriend of Marnie, had finally committed to love after 20 episodes of turmoil.) It turned out a radical new direction was available! When Marnie encounters a transformed Charlie — once docile, now a Stanley Kowalski type — she reconnects with him to hide out from the dramas of her real life. Their blissed-out night together has an insidious undertow, as Marnie, gleefully pushing past her instincts, overlooks that Charlie is now a cocaine dealer. Once Marnie wakes up, she realizes she must return to her old life. This was, perhaps, one of the last moments Marnie could contemplate a full- scale reinvention, and Williams’ performance is imbued with a wistful acknowledgment of the passage of time that hits with a wallop.

For all intents and purposes, “Goodbye Tour” is the series finale of “Girls”; the actual last episode is more of a coda. It’s in “Goodbye Tour” that Hannah, Marnie, Jessa and Shoshanna are in the same place for what will probably be the last time. The friend group has already drifted so far apart that Shoshanna has gotten engaged without inviting Hannah to the celebration, or even telling her she’s dating someone. “I think we should all agree to call it,” Shoshanna says. “Girls” began with Shoshanna drawing attention to the forced feeling of the TV-show friend group (“Why are we all standing in a line?”). It ends with her once again acknowledging what TV so rarely does: that friendships can outlive their usefulness as the friends’ circles expand along with their lives. Without a community in New York, there’s nothing to keep Hannah from accepting a teaching job upstate. When she sees a couple of best friends shopping for their first apartment, she’s looking back in time at her Season 1 self, underscoring how far “Girls” has followed these characters past their starting point. But friendships fade, new chapters open and TV series come to a close.

The Hannah-Marnie relationship can go under-discussed in evaluations of the “Girls” legacy in part because of just how real it was; it evolved, changed forms and even faded from view in the way of real friendships. Perhaps the moment that crystallized it was the ending of “All Adventurous Women Do,” in which Hannah — having come to terms with various personal dramas — brings Marnie into her bedroom for a dance party culminating in an embrace. What came before, in this episode, was the glimmering sense of how many surprising challenges adult life might come to present: Hannah’s ex Elijah came out to her, and she was diagnosed with HPV. Hannah is a congenital overthinker, and spends much of the episode agonizing over how her life is changing, but her choice to let things go and to lean on her complicated, beloved best friend makes for an all-timer of a closing sequence.

Landing only months before the 2017 revelations of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual abuse kicked off the #MeToo movement, this episode exemplifies Dunham’s uncanny ability to pick up on moods thrumming beneath the surface of the culture just before they break into view. Here, Hannah visits the home of celebrated novelist Chuck Palmer (Matthew Rhys), at his invitation, to discuss rumors that he is a sex pest. (She’s written about the rumors; he denies them.) The story trickily shifts, and then shifts again — Hannah is taken in by Chuck’s worldliness and charm before he, as if by compulsion, exposes his genitals. Much writing would be produced, in the months and years after “American Bitch,” about the problem of what to do with men who exploit power imbalances. This episode doesn’t have an answer, but it rigorously and honestly documents what it feels like to be, for a tense and painful moment, inside the question.

One shocking three-word statement from her mother shifts Hannah from bougie comfort to the precarity that defines the entirety of “Girls”: “No more money.” After being cut off by her parents, Hannah attempts to turn her internship at an independent publisher into a real job and fails. Then she tries to reconnect with her old friend Jessa and can’t. Finally, she tries to escape it all by drinking opium tea and ends up weepily confessing her ambition — and her need for recognition — to her parents. From this first episode, “Girls” was made with a startling confidence. Hannah emerges as an utterly believable character, down to her episode-ending decision to steal a tip her parents left for their hotel maid. But a greater feat may be the seamless and complete world she inhabits, with her family and friends introduced with wit and carefully chosen detail.

“Girls” is the defining text of a deeply millennial experience: the feeling that — to quote another HBO masterpiece, “The Sopranos” — the protagonists’ generation “came in at the end of something.” No episode illustrates that thesis as well as “One Man’s Trash.” After Hannah goes to apologize to Joshua (Patrick Wilson), the handsome doctor in whose trash cans she’s been dumping garbage from the coffee shop where she works, she finds herself enjoying a lost weekend ensconced in the wealth and stability that feel so unattainable to her as a freelance writer and barista. The rest of the world — including the rest of the main cast — falls away, in the first and best example of “Girls” breaking form to tighten its focus, an approach that would pay dividends in seasons to come. To the episode’s eternal credit, Joshua is no mere fantasy for Hannah to project onto; he’s recently separated and just as adrift in his way as his temporary fling. Hannah’s dawning realization that she may crave comfort and support as much as exotic experiences to fuel her artistry gives “One Man’s Trash” its enduring impact. In the long aftermath of the stock market crash of 2008, literary renown is a lofty dream, but basic prosperity feels even more out of reach.