Craig Blankenhorn/HBO
'Girls'
The co-showrunners have been Instagramming their final days filming the HBO show.
Girls finished filming its sixth and final season early Friday morning and co-showrunners Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner are already mourning the end of the HBO show, which won't premiere until 2017.
Dunham and Konner documented the final, overnight shoot on Instagram. Konner posted a photo of what she said was the "second to last shot" of Girls, an image of Dunham's Hannah with her eyes closed and head tilted upwards.
Dunham, meanwhile, used the occasion to post a lengthy, emotional goodbye.
"It’s 2 am on Friday morning and we just finished shooting Girls. Forever. No insert shots of cell phones or exteriors to grab. We’re not missing a quick shot of Shosh marching down a Soho street. We’re finished. We did it all. Jenni called that final cut, I dropped my costume on our van floors (sorry Kristen, sorry I never hang my damned costume) and we got into our vans to head home for the last time," Dunham wrote, accompanying a photo in which it looked as if she'd been crying. "To say I don't enjoy goodbyes is an understatement. But, as a wise woman once told me, 'relish it. We so rarely get to choose our goodbyes.' She's right. And we got to choose this one. But that doesn't mean it's easy-- I know I'm not alone in the Girls family when I say this is the end of the largest and most potent chapter of my life so far. Before Girls I had zero identity, zero self-love and an urgent sense of untapped creative desire that kept me up and sweating at night in other people's beds, wondering why vague sexual affirmation wasn’t enough to make me feel human. I had hardly an inkling of the responsibility we take on when we tell stories, or of the power words can have, but what I had- as an obsessed fan of shows from Girlfriends to Felicity to Ally McBeal- was the audacity to think that people might want to see women like my friends and me (broken, imperfect, angry) on television. When we shot our pilot six years ago, I never dreamed that I could be so fulfilled by the process of art-making, of collaboration, of honest expression. And so through this show I developed an identity, gained a new kind of family and began my life in earnest. It's an embarrassment of riches."
She praised the fans who made her "believe there was a place for the strange girls and the ones who don't know how to love quite yet" and said the cast, crew, writers and producers would always be her "comrades" and she'd be there for them forever.
"Thank you for accepting me, for creating a world of acceptance and for holding me through some of the toughest times I've known," she continued. "Thank you for being fierce and creative. Thank you for putting up with my tits for six years, even when they got so, so boring. Thank you for making me feel like I was at the center of a trampoline of good will. To the men of Girls, both cast and crew, thank you for restoring my faith in the beauty and sensitivity that masculine strength can provide. Thank you for healing my fear and my heart. And the the women of girls, you are as bad as they come."
Allison Williams, who wrapped her final scenes on Thursday, posting her own heartfelt farewell and appreciation, even hung out on set for the final night of shooting. Dunham also posted a tear-filled selfie of her and and her onscreen best friend, captioning it in part, "This is what 45 minutes of sobbing followed by me forcing a selfie on Allison looks like."
Dunham, Konner, Williams and other members of the Girls family have been posting photos to Instagram in the past few weeks as the show has crept towards finishing filming. Many of the images, hashtagged #endofgirls can be seen here. Co-stars Zosia Mamet and Jemima Kirke wrapped filming four weeks ago and got their own Instagram goodbyes.
While the series has finished filming, Dunham and Co. will be back to promote it in January, she teased on Instagram, with the sixth and final airing on HBO in 2017.
Konner has said that Girls fans shouldn't look to have everything tied up with a bow when the final episode airs.
"I think we'll probably stop them mid-flow," she said after the fifth-season finale, coincidentally on the day of the first table read for season six. "I think the ending isn't going to feel like a wrap-up exactly, but we truly don't know, because we haven't written it yet."
Check out Dunham and Konner's photos below.
Just the second to last shot we will ever shoot on Girls. No big. #endofgirls
A photo posted by @jennikonner on Sep 29, 2016 at 10:00pm PDT
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