Judd Apatow Is Finally Feeling The Ladies

By Irin Carmon | September 8, 2010 | 4:55pm

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We’ve already given HBO credit for heavily recruiting female talent after a season of bromance. Now we’re happy to hear that the bromance king himself, Judd Apatow, is teaming up with a rising star, Lena Dunham, for an HBO pilot.

Deadline Hollywood Daily reports that HBO has ordered a pilot from Dunham, whose Tiny Furniture took a top prize at South By Southwest and had critics swooning. Apatow, who will executive produce, is quoted saying, “Lena has a unique, truthful comic voice. I am excited to work with her and learn from her.” Here’s what we know about the project:

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The 24-year-old Dunham wrote the untitled comedy, about the assorted humiliations and rare triumphs of a group of girls in their early 20’s. She will also direct the pilot, star in it, and co-executive produce.

There’s the obligatory tie-in with “emerging adulthood” too, although no would could say that Dunham isn’t doing spectacularly well for anyone, let alone a twenty-four year-old someone. That precociousness, enabled talent as well as privilege (her parents are successful artists), has a broader context of newly multitasked childhoods and access to technology. It’s a piece of the twentysomething story that has been less often told than that of the parentally-clinging slacker. As we wrote about Dunham and a contemporary, Greta Gerwig,

Both women are emerging from a DIY aesthetic made possible by technological advances, not to mention their expensive liberal arts educations (Gerwig at Barnard, Dunham at Oberlin.) Both are based in New York and seem to favor a subtle, low-key, hyperrealist aesthetic. And though the narrow slice of humanity from which they hail – white, urban, educated – is already pretty well-represented in the indie space, even that supposedly enlightened quadrant has had few female narrators.

We’re all about funny women, including funny twentysomething women, and what with ordering Dunham’s pilot, developing Julie Klausner’s book about dating in your twenties, and optioning Mara Altman’s book about trying to have an orgasm in your twenties, HBO clearly agrees these days. Let’s hope at least one of them makes it to series, and that they won’t somehow cancel each other out. And maybe after that, we won’t be in a position where the narratives of young, educated, white women in big cities even need to be considered “diversity,” because there’ll be room for so much else. A girl can dream.

HBO Greenlights Judd Apatow, Lena Dunham Coming Of Age Comedy Pilots [Deadline]

Earlier: We’re Emotionally Invested In HBO’s New Funny Lady Show
A Fine Bromance: Where Are HBO’s Shows About Women?
Will Twentysomething Women Beat The Cinema Gender Gap?
We’re Not Immature, We’re Emerging Adults