What’s fascinating about Hannah, and what guaranteed a backlash to Girls is the character’s absolute refusal to stay in her place. She’s hungry for sex but not grateful for it. She has no need for Adam or anyone else to teach her that she deserves to be treated well: Hannah knows that, demands it, negotiates her shaky way towards it. The pilot initially presented Hannah’s statement that “I think I might be the voice of my generation, or of a generation” as a drug-induced delusion, but the show’s become a story about what it might take for Hannah to fulfill that potential: the writing of hers we’ve heard has been good, and her pursuit of experiences that will fuel that writing has been more concentrated than her efforts to find steady employment or to work out any of her relationships. In another, more conventional, movie or show, Hannah’s full humanity would be something others magnanimously grant her, not that she already knows she deserves.