5. “Two Plane Rides” (S3, Ep 12)
Picking the best season of “Girls” is a tough task, and despite it having the most episodes of any on this list, we wouldn’t necessarily put forward the third season for the honor: as the longest (it’s 12 episodes versus 10 for the rest), it ambles a bit more, and the first half, as the show attempts to deal with Christopher Abbott’s exit, is a little more awkward. But the second half of the season makes a strong argument for being the best-ever run of episodes, culminating in the wonderful “Two Plane Rides,” maybe the best season finale the show ever did (until next Sunday’s, we hope…). It’s not quite one of big changes or twists, though a couple of surprises are in store: first, Hannah learns that Caroline (Gaby Hoffman), Adam’s troubled sister, and mildly creepy downstairs neighbor Laird (Jon Glaser) have shacked up and are having a baby together, before discovering she’s been accepted to the Iowa Writing Workshop. Beyond that, though, it otherwise continues to develop, but doesn’t resolve, the character’s journeys: Marnie is drawn further to Desi, Shoshanna fails to graduate from college and looks for solace with Ray, Jessa agrees to help Bedelia (Louise Lasser) kill herself, only for the artist to change her mind, and Adam and Hannah’s relationship continues to deteriorate as he opens on Broadway. It’s not especially flashy, but it feels like the show operating at the peak of its powers, and as much as anything was an early indication of the stealthy maturation of the show that you might not have noticed, but turned out to be there: these characters were changing and growing up, even if they were doing so slowly…
4. “Flo” (S3, Ep 9)
“Girls” has been a show about friends more than it is about family, but whenever Dunham has widened the scope to include family, from Rita Wilson’s great turn as Marnie’s nightmarish mother to Ben Mendelsohn’s season 2 cameo as Jessa’s dad, it’s proven just as incisive and savagely funny as when it’s on home territory. Perhaps the finest family-centric half-hour, the taste of the “Transparent”-type family dramedy that Dunham could have written (and might eventually still write), was Season 3’s “Flo,” which mostly focuses on Hannah’s home life. It sees then-recent Oscar nominee June Squibb from “Nebraska” play Hannah’s Grandma Flo, who has contracted pneumonia and appears to be on the way out, so Hannah and Adam head upstate in order to see her. In the process, we get to see some of the extended family: not just Hannah’s mom (Becky Anne Baker), but also her sisters (Deirdre Lovejoy and Amy Morton, wonderful character actresses both doing fine work) and her cousin (an episode-stealing Sarah Steele, from “The Good Wife”). As penned by cartoonist and “Six Feet Under” veteran Bruce Eric Kaplan, it almost feels like a stealth pilot episode, so detailed and vibrant are the characters and their relationships with each other, and by putting Hannah in a very different context (particularly generationally, as with Loreen’s request that her mother believes that Hannah is engaged), it sheds new light on the character and, crucially, her relationship with Adam, which begins to finally unravel here. It’s a funny, genuinely moving stand-alone half-hour that’s near the peak of what the show did.
3. “All Adventurous Women Do” (S1, Ep 3)
“Girls” came strong out of the gate with its pilot, one of the more confident and well-executed first episodes in recent TV history. But we’d argue that it had its first truly great installment a couple of weeks later with the tremendous “All Adventurous Women Do.” It’s not the most formally inventive even in the first season, but it’s where the juggling of the various character’s plotlines starts to hit a groove — Hannah finds out she has HPV, and discovers that her ex-boyfriend Elijah (Andrew Rannells, making his first glorious appearance as one of the show’s best characters here, and it’s worth noting that, this early, he calls out Hannah’s dad for likely being attracted to men) is gay, while Shoshanna confesses her virginity, Marnie is pulled towards artist Booth Jonathan (Jorma Taccone), and Jessa is attracted to the father of the children she’s babysitting (James LeGros). It’s probably the funniest episode of the first season, arguably the sexiest, too, in some respects, but more than anything, it’s the one where the point-of-view of the show really starts to crystalize. The title refers to something that Jessa tells Hannah about her STD: that all adventurous women have something like this. And the episode suggests, particularly in its glorious ending, as Hannah tweets the titular phrase before throwing down to Robyn’s “Dancing On Your Own” (helping the song become an iconic millennial anthem), that your 20s are about making mistakes, and those mistakes are something that you should celebrate.
2. “American Bitch” (S6, Ep 3)
Final seasons aren’t always triumphs, but even if it’s not been as consistently terrific as the fifth (it’s tipped a little broad in places), Season Six of “Girls” has been pretty brilliant so far (we reserve the right to change our mind if it goes a bit last-episode-of-“Lost” with the finale, obviously). There were a number of episodes we considered, but it’s the biggest gamble of the run, and certainly the most talked about, that undoubtedly lodged in our memories. Even by the standard of the show’s two-handers or non-Brooklyn episodes, “American Bitch” felt atypical, closer to the kind of experiment that “Louie” or “Atlanta” would pull off, a virtual stand-alone where Dunham’s face is almost the only thing that ties it to the rest of the show. The episode sees Hannah, back in the writing game, visit a best-selling, much-acclaimed 40-something novelist (played outstandingly by “The Americans” star Matthew Rhys), who’s invited her there after she wrote a blog post highlighting accusations of sexual harassment towards him. It feels almost like a Torn From The Headlines “Law & Order” episode by way of David Mamet’s “Oleanna,” as Hannah and Chuck perform a sort of Socratic dialogue about consent, privilege, power and art. In isolation, it’d be a fascinating episode, doubly so because of the parallels with Dunham’s own public persona, and triply so because it uses one of the show’s last few episodes to examine these questions. But it doesn’t quite feel like “Girls,” until it really does, as Hannah ends up, like many girls before her, touching the novelist’s penis when he pulls it out. And then it ends with a moment of almost magic realism, as director Richard Shepard shows a huge number of women passing Hannah and going into the apartment as she leaves it. Even in its twilight years, “Girls” was capable of surprising and astounding us.
1. “The Panic In Central Park” (S5, Ep 6)
Picking a number one episode for this list was a tricky task — the show’s been one of the most consistently strong comedies in memory, and we could have run this list in virtually any order and felt all right with it. But we had to find one, and were surprised to find ourselves drawn to perhaps the show’s most atypical episode, one that doesn’t even feature the main character of the show (Dunham did write the script, though, with Richard Shepard directing). “The Panic In Central Park” is very much a sort of sequel to “One Man’s Trash,” and a precursor to “American Bitch” (both Shepard/Dunham joints) in that it’s essentially a two-hander. But this time, Hannah wasn’t at the center: instead, it’s Marnie, a character who is arguably usually the least sympathetic of the show’s central four women. Here, going for a nighttime walk after yet another fight with Desi, she unexpectedly — not least for viewers, who weren’t remotely expecting it at the time — runs into her ex-boyfriend Charlie, as played by Christopher Abbott, who’d left the show suddenly and seemingly semi-acrimoniously at the end of Season 2 (later telling the New York Times “it wasn’t as relatable for me on a personal level”). Once a sweet, boyish kid, he’s now bearded and shaven-headed, thrown off his tech-world success to become a coke dealer with a heroin habit, and the two spend an evening, half-“Before Sunrise,” half-“After Hours” (she briefly poses as a sex worker), reconnecting, sleeping together and ultimately pushing her over the edge to make the decision to end her marriage to Desi. It’s gorgeously directed by Shepard, finding a tone that’s sort of new for the show even among the more experimental episodes, as if Abbott has brought the Antonio Campos vibes of the work he’d done since with him for a while. It’s a near-perfect, self-contained piece of TV, and the boldest and best thing the show ever did.
Honestly, our longlist for this feature ran to about half the total 62 episodes of the show, so consistent was the quality over the past few years. We won’t mention them all here, but to name just a few, we’d include the pilot, Season 1’s “The Return” (where Hannah goes back to her parents), and the next episode, “Welcome To Bushwick,” aka The One Where Shoshanna Smokes Crack. In Season 2, we loved episode 6, “Boys,” directed by Claudia Weill of “Girlfriends”; as well as the next ep “Video Games,” which featured a strong cameo from Ben Mendelsohn. In Season 3, we picked out episode 4, “Dead Inside,” following the aftermath of the death of Hannah’s publisher, played by John Cameron Mitchell; as well as episode 6, “Free Snacks,” which sees our heroine start work at GQ, and episode 10, “Role-Play,” featuring a pre-Oscar nomination and “Star Wars” Felicity Jones.
In Season 4, the near-experimental “Sit In,” as Hannah locks herself in Adam’s apartment, was stellar, as was “Tad & Loreen & Avi & Shanaz,” featuring the great Fred Melamed and Hannah’s dad finally coming out, plus the strong, time-jump-enabled finale “Home Birth.” Season 5 had all kinds of great ones, including the Shoshanna-centric “Japan”; the end of Hannah’s relationship with Fran in “Homeward Bound”; “Love Stories,” which returned Jenny Slate to the show as well as bringing an end to Elijah’s affair with Corey Stoll’s newsman; and satisfying finale “I Love You Baby.” Meanwhile, Season 6 had a few great ones too, including the Riz Ahmed-featuring opener “All I Ever Wanted”; episode 5 “Gummies,” featuring a great showcase for Becky Ann Baker as Hannah’s mother; and the Elijah-centric “The Bounce” two episodes later. Did we fail to mention your favorite? Let us know in the comments.
