Read Lena Dunham’s original one-sheet ‘Girls’ pitch for HBO

Although she has since described it as “pretentious and horrifying”, Lena Dunham’s one-page pitch to HBO about a group of friends in “that uncomfortable middle ground” managed to change the course of TV history.

This document has been floating around the internet since last year — when The Hollywood Reporter published it alongside a quite thorough oral history of the show — but with Dunham and Konner’s new program now going into development, it deserves revisiting.

“It was like a tone poem about millennial life”, Dunham explains of the original pitch document. “It doesn’t mention a character, doesn’t mention a plot. ‘They’re everything, they’re nothing, they’re everywhere, they’re nowhere.’

“I mean, it’s the worst pitch you’ve ever read — pretentious and horrifying — but I remember writing it, sitting on the floor listening to Tegan and Sara in my underwear, being like, ‘I’m a genius.'”

The pitch became Girls, Lena became — as her opiate-addled character proclaimed in the pilot — the voice of a generation, and the rest is yours to debate in think-pieces.

Check out the pitch document below, via THR.

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