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From the Gawker-Jezebel fight in last week's episode to the Mindy Kaling conversation in the most recent one, it's more and more clear that Girls' Hannah Horvath exists in a Lena Dunham world. That or Dunham just likes to make inside jokes.
When Girls started, the conversation revolved, to an extent, around how "real" the show was. Is this how girls, today, in Brooklyn are really living their lives? With all that bad sex? The show, this season, has strayed far from the real. Shoshanna is a cartoon character. Hannah is something of a monster. And while Hannah's sociopathic tendencies seem light years away from the Lena Dunham we see poised and eloquent on red carpets and in interviews, Dunham's off screen persona is still very much a part of the show's identity.
So that's why it's can pull the viewer out of the moment of the show itself when her character has an awkward argument with her boyfriend over the merits of Gawker and Jezebel, considering Dunham herself has publicly sparred with those publications. Or when, in this episode, which aired Saturday to avoid a Super Bowl conflict, Hannah goes into meet with a new publisher and they have a discussion about Mindy Kaling, a friend of Dunham's. "I love Mindy Kaling, she's terrific," Horvath says when the publisher brings up Kaling, and then they discuss how Hannah "takes it there" in a way Kaling doesn't. And it sort of makes one think: what would Hannah Horvath think of Lena Dunham? She'd probably completely resent her, right?