Girls reboot: HBO locks Lena Dunham and the original cast for five episodes — the one name fans want back is still off the list

HBO announced the Girls revival on October 13: five episodes, with production starting in summer 2027 and no release date yet. Lena Dunham, Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke and Zosia Mamet all return as the original four, and Andrew Rannells comes back as Elijah.

The announcement arrived as a video of the five on a group call, with Dunham pitching the idea to her castmates on camera. Her version of the sell:

"Can we still call it 'Girls'? Because we're like old as f—k."

— Lena Dunham, in HBO's announcement video

Everyone said yes on the spot, Rannells while joking that his castmates can't be left unsupervised. Dunham told E! the characters "started talking to me in the shower" around her 40th birthday in May; the revival will pick the group up in their 40s, a decade after the 2017 finale sent Hannah upstate with baby Grover. Dunham executive produces with Judd Apatow and Ilene S. Landress.

The Driver-shaped hole

Adam Driver is not in the announced cast, and this time the omission comes with context. In her memoir Famesick, published weeks before the announcement, Dunham wrote that Driver was "verbally aggressive" during filming of the original show.

That's a different situation from the usual scheduling excuse. Driver spent the years since Girls becoming a two-time Oscar nominee, which is exactly why fans put Adam at the top of every reunion wishlist — and exactly why his name missing from a cast list that includes literally everyone else reads as a decision, not a logistics problem.

Every original Girl said yes on one group call. The cast member with two Oscar nominations wasn't on the call.

One more absence worth logging: Jenni Konner, Dunham's co-showrunner across all six seasons, isn't involved either. The two ended their producing partnership in 2018, so the revival is Dunham running Girls without her original creative other half for the first time.

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What the show comes back to

Dunham has already sketched where the characters landed, in interviews around the memoir. Her working ideas: Shoshanna divorced from the mayor of New York, Marnie on her third marriage, Jessa unvaccinated and living on a boat in Croatia, Hannah teaching at Bard with a son and a chef girlfriend — and Adam, notably, a cult theater actor in Berlin, meaning Dunham has thought about the character even without the actor.

The commercial logic is plain. The original ran 2012–2017, won Dunham Golden Globes and reshaped a decade of TV about women, and HBO comedy chief Amy Gravitt framed the pitch around seeing how the five have grown. Dunham, for her part, arrives off Too Much, the Netflix series she launched last year; production starts next summer, so realistically this airs in late 2027 at the earliest, more likely 2028.

Previously we wrote: Sam Levinson signed with Amazon after Euphoria. Fans are congratulating HBO