The Worst Pitch You've Ever Read

As Girls enters its final season, THR presents an oral (and other orifices) history of HBO’s GROUNDBREAKING COMEDY, from Lena Dunham’s ‘horrifying’ pitch to casting Adam Driver (‘I thought it would be fun to play someone who does MORALLY QUESTIONABLE things’) to breaking the ultimate TV TABOO with a ‘conclusion shot’ (conditioner and Cetaphil, actually) seen ’round the world

- Lacey Rose

Turns OUT

Lena Dunham’s introductory line in that very first episode of Girls — “I’m the voice of my generation … or at least a voice of a generation” — couldn’t have been more on the nose.

Over the past half-decade, Dunham’s millennial dramedy chronicling the lives of four 20-something women in New York has on more than one occasion seized the pop cultural conversation and steered it into areas that sometimes made even HBO uncomfortable. True, it never was an audience magnet — a typical season grossed between 4 million and 5 million weekly viewers — but it made up for that in buzz as it pushed the boundaries of casual nudity, gender identification and sexual mores and ignited controversies over everything from race to rape. With the series coming to an end with 10 final episodes beginning Feb. 12, HBO programming chief Casey Bloys jokes, “Lena Dunham single-handedly created the think piece industry.”

Dunham was all of 23 when she sold Girls to HBO with a page-and-a-half-long pitch that included nary a character nor a plot. Her only calling card? Tiny Furniture, a $50,000 indie film about a young woman who moves back home after college that Dunham wrote, directed and starred in, alongside her real-life friends and family. But the movie, which won the narrative film prize at the 2010 South by Southwest Film Festival, had some very big fans, including HBO’s then-entertainment president Sue Naegle and producer Judd Apatow.